If it weren’t so important I would file this under some category like Toys for Boys, but when Chris (who sits across from me at Kable) tossed me his copy of Jane’s Defence Weekly, it fell open to a page with two stories, headlined ‘US Army Ground Robots See Exponential Growth’ and ‘SWORDS Armed Robots Join Combat Team in Iraq.’ I think this technology has emerged…

Highlights of the articles:

The U.S. Army has more than 5,000 unmanned ground vehicles operating in Iraq and Afghanistan (up from 163 in 2004)

The Special Weapons Observation Remote reconnaisance Direct action System (SWORDS), an armed robotic system, is currently deployed with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq.

Sadly, the operating constraint so familiar to all of us is the low battery life–four hours.

For UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles), flight time has gone up from 100 hours per day (for the fleet) in 2005 to 500 hours per day in 2007.

The principle operating constraint for UAVs is their bandwidth requirements. “One Global Hawk UAV consumes about 500 Mbits/s of satellite-provided bandwidth, more than five times the total bandwidth consumed by the entire US military during Operation ‘Desert Storm.’ ” Now you know why the US DoD bankrolled the Internet in the first place…

500 Mbits/s? What information is that? Live video of the cockpit view, thermal imaging, what else? And who’s evaluating this? What decisions do you make from this? Perhaps more importantly, why are deaths by friendly fire still so prevalent?

Jane’s Defence Weekly, 15 August 2007