At any disposals store you can buy Hoochie Cord (see http://www.kitbag.com.au/prod248.htm ) which is a classic piece of high-tech low-tech with many uses. Besides tying up tents and shoes, it is also used for signaling. Yes that’s right, at the same time the Yankees are recreating Star Wars with their massive military budgets, the Australians are talking to each other over bits of string. However, sending signals over string has a long and successful history and has been demonstrated to be reliable, silent, immune to jamming, difficult to intercept, cheap, lightweight, and recyclable. The most remarkable property of this invention is the ability to send signals to a sleeping recipient and wake him up at the same time, without alerting the enemy.

Sadly the details of the technique are poorly documented (generally passed to it’s advocates only by direct demonstration) and it will possibly one day fall into disuse and vanish from history.

As for the bots, yeah Obama seems to be enthused on them, big spending on tech weapons. Of course, once the basic design is figured out, they will be captured and copied so all sides will have them. Once that happens, a haze of plausible deniability will develop because there’s not much to prove who really is driving (these devices are perfect for spies, criminals and terrorists).

You have never seen a report about demining or IED defusing? What about search robots? Hmm, have you read any reports?

I would guess that unmanned explosives probably hold the record for random destruction. The big budget never got allocated to cleaning up Vietnam or Cambodia, so those countries will no doubt be happy to see the research and development pushing forward.

The grief was caused by pilots with insufficient intelligence or ground contact. That’s not a property of unmanned aircraft, that’s a property of air warfare generally.

Unmanned aircraft have a lot of advantages, particularly in cost, performance, risk and endurance. An unmanned aircraft is cheaper, can perform maneuver past human limitations, does not require search-and-rescue mechanisms for when it crashes or is shot down and if designed properly can stay on station for much longer than a normal aircraft because you can work the pilots in shifts.

In terms of usage, recon is the ideal one for small UAVs (like the one in the picture above), but they are also useful for loitering over a battlefield.

What they should not be used for is shooting at wedding parties. The US have got to break the habit of shooting at big gatherings when they don’t know what they are.

Australia should have dozens of them. Hundreds even. In particular they would form an ideal way to patrol our northern waters.

As for battleground robots

You have never seen a report about demining or IED defusing? What about search robots? Hmm, have you read any reports?

As for battleground robots…….

Even with 12,000 on the ground I’ve seen no reports of anything useful that they’ve ever accomplished. I’d like to think that after the lesson dawned, following Australia’s purchase of a number of 68 ton Abrams tanks and the subsequent need to buy a couple of aircraft that could accommodate them (one at a time IIRC), that our military planners have thought a little more carefully about buying the latest toys for the boys.