I know that in order to stay on top of defense (and offense) we need to constantly trying to innovate and incorporate the latest technology into our military, but I'll be danged if as a human being, I don't find the idea of armed robots running through the woods, flying in the air and swimming in the sea worrisome...

The Navy's Orcas are expected to be put to use for underwater surveillance, minesweeping and electronic warfare. Defence Blog wrote the Navy could also integrate "diverse armaments such as cruise missiles, torpedoes, and aerial drones into XLUUVs."

"This is the culmination of more than a decade of pioneering work, developing a long-range, fully autonomous undersea vehicle with a large payload capacity that can operate completely independently of a host vehicle," Ann Stevens, vice president of Boeing's maritime and intelligence systems, said in a statement.

The Orca XLUUV’s full, advanced #autonomy allows the vehicle to operate for months at a time in open, congested and contested waters with little-to-no human intervention.


If it can carry cruise missiles then it can carry nukes too...

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I'm all for it. Fewer humans in harms way for sure. I would suspect there are plans somewhere to use drones to deliver tactical nukes. We already use drones to deliver hellfire missiles, wouldn't think it would be much of a stretch to deliver a small nuke. Would be next to impossible to defend against.

With as smart as the folks are who put these incredible engineering accomplishments together, do you think any of them ever ask. "What could go wrong"?.

You wonder if A.I. at this point is just biding its time and waiting for us to:

A. Create enough autonomous weapons to destroy humanity.
B. Create enough autonomous robotic manufacturing processes to where A.I. could be totally self-replicating after it kills off all the humans.

Thats the thing. Elon Musk has emphatically said that any A.I. of any kind needs an emergency kill-switch that a real human can control. The other tech geniuses out there do not want to discuss that at all because it is a threat to their invention.

I agree about less humans in harm's way, but I guess it depends on which side you are on.

One of the Sub-Reddits that I follow shows footage from the Ukraine War. Lots of that footage is poor Russian bastards trying to evade the Ukrainian drones and they always end up getting wasted in the end. As a guy who served in the Marines, when I see those I think of myself being in that position with some enemy's drone chasing me down or worse yet some A.I. controlled autonomous drone relentlessly hunting me down. There would be no place to hide.

Perhaps skeet shooting training will be a new requirement at advanced infantry training school.

I see it as a way for our government to oppress us in the future. Have an insurrection, send in the drones.

China will hack the software controlling the subs and launch the missiles against us.

Insurrection being defined as liking Trump on Twitter.

For now. But what they always fail to think about is that they could end up being the insurrectionists as fast as they have made us their enemy.

Won't need to. They will just shovel Biden some cash and he will hand over the codes!

I like to think that no matter who's president, be it Trump or Biden, that there is a group of very smart men actually running things, a shadow government if you will, that actually pulls all the strings and makes sure that everything stays on an even keel and there's never too much change in either direction and no one person is allowed to screw the country (And the world for that matter) too much. Some people think it's a conspiracy, and I do too, but I find it actually comforting to know that the country is never actually in the hands of the morons that we elect.

I believe the Obama's have been running the show ever since Biden got in office...probably why he bought a house and they never left DC....02

Dont forget the houses in Chicago, Martha's Vineyard, Hawaii, and probably others places that ain't on the public list.

It ain't the Obama's or the Clintons. It's much bigger than them. It's much bigger than the US even.

I think it all started after WWII maybe even before WWII with the genesis of it all being driven by the devastation of WWI and possibly what the Fascists and Imperialists were trying to do was to head it all off and resist it, but the US and our allies won and the new World order was put into place. The Bretton Woods Agreement was part of it. The Jewish State was part of it. The Cold War was part of it.

Lots of wars have been fought since WWII and lots of people have died, but there have been no all encompassing World Wars since then, and I think that this group that is in actual power is the reason for that.

I have no idea if that is a good thing or a bad thing. All I know is that it is what it is and there's not a damn thing I can do about it either way. All I can do is live my life the best I can and trust that God is in ultimate control.

So my point with the whole post is that it doesn't really matter who we think is in control: Jimmy carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Barak Obama, Donald Trump, etc... none of them were ever really in control they are just actors in a grand play placed there to keep us all busy bitchin' and complaining or cheering them on when they say something we like on the news or social media. It's all bread and circuses regardless of which side of the political spectrum you fall on.

So the vehicle would be autonomous for surveillance but the execution of a detonation would still need military personal authorization. Typically from the undersea operations standpoint this would look something like it running autonomously to look at say a stretch of pipeline or an area of interest that has mines. It would sweep and take images and return or surface to send information about the area and identify things it thought were mines or threats. military personnel would then tell it to go back and destroy the targets. Something like that. It’s not complete autonomy at this point.

I'm sure it's not completely autonomous, but it's just one of many steps along the way.

Back in the day, a guy sitting in a computer chair in Las Vegas, Nevada, taking out an SUV moving at 80 mph full of high value targets somewhere in the dessert, sounded fantastical, but now-a-days it seems common place. Makes you think that one day wars will be fought by video gamers and autonomous robots.

I know a 100lb 5 foot tall woman who probably has more confirmed drone kills than John Rambo did in the first three movies. Her office was in Las Vegas.