Googles Big Dog for counter-insurgency?

[Zaune]

Hacking military robotics is unlikely to be within the capability of third world insurgent groups, even with plenty of destroyed hardware to study and helpers distributed over the internet. The closed source embedded code will be secured by redundant hardware and software measures including layered encryption, obfuscation, auto-erase and (for anything but disposable units) physical self-destruct of the processor & storage. Swapping in complete replacement processors should work in isolated situations where inability to verify on IFF is not a problem, but engineering that to work with the chassis won't be cheap or easy either. To be a significant threat support from a nation state with a copious military/intelligence budget and an advanced IT industry would be required.

Or a highly-placed private contractor with a score to settle and possibly a suitcase full of used notes.

[Simon_Jester]

I just threw that number out there. The point is that the cost of sustaining one soldier for one year in (for example) Iraq is already on the close order of one million dollars. Once you reach that level of expense, it becomes thinkable to buy a multimillion dollar piece of equipment just to do a job that would otherwise require one soldier to do.

If a robot costs five million up front, costs only half a million a year to maintain in the field (for a number of possible reasons) and lasts ten years... well, that's pretty competitive with actual infantry then.

Whereas the cost calculation is totally different for insurgents, for a host of reasons.

Hacking military robotics is unlikely to be within the capability of third world insurgent groups, even with plenty of destroyed hardware to study and helpers distributed over the internet. The closed source embedded code will be secured by redundant hardware and software measures including layered encryption, obfuscation, auto-erase and (for anything but disposable units) physical self-destruct of the processor & storage. Swapping in complete replacement processors should work in isolated situations where inability to verify on IFF is not a problem, but engineering that to work with the chassis won't be cheap or easy either. To be a significant threat support from a nation state with a copious military/intelligence budget and an advanced IT industry would be required.

Or a highly-placed private contractor with a score to settle and possibly a suitcase full of used notes.

To tell the truth this idea sounds more like the plot of an Iron Man movie than like something actually likely to happen on a regular basis in reality.

[Silver Jedi]

I just threw that number out there. The point is that the cost of sustaining one soldier for one year in (for example) Iraq is already on the close order of one million dollars. Once you reach that level of expense, it becomes thinkable to buy a multimillion dollar piece of equipment just to do a job that would otherwise require one soldier to do.

If a robot costs five million up front, costs only half a million a year to maintain in the field (for a number of possible reasons) and lasts ten years... well, that's pretty competitive with actual infantry then.

Whereas the cost calculation is totally different for insurgents, for a host of reasons.

The armed UGVs the Army has right now cost around $230,000 when they were first introduced. The price was supposed to drop as they entered mass production, but I don't know if that actually happened.

[Simon_Jester]

That's good; on the other hand there ARE ongoing upkeep costs, and a future COIN ground-trooper-bot would probably be more complex, expensive, and versatile than any current UGV.

[Pelranius]

Hacking military robotics is unlikely to be within the capability of third world insurgent groups, even with plenty of destroyed hardware to study and helpers distributed over the internet. The closed source embedded code will be secured by redundant hardware and software measures including layered encryption, obfuscation, auto-erase and (for anything but disposable units) physical self-destruct of the processor & storage. Swapping in complete replacement processors should work in isolated situations where inability to verify on IFF is not a problem, but engineering that to work with the chassis won't be cheap or easy either. To be a significant threat support from a nation state with a copious military/intelligence budget and an advanced IT industry would be required.

Or a highly-placed private contractor with a score to settle and possibly a suitcase full of used notes.

To tell the truth this idea sounds more like the plot of an Iron Man movie than like something actually likely to happen on a regular basis in reality.

Considering what passes for cyber security these days, the state sponsor of said insurgents would probably be able to exflitrate a fair amount of data.

[Steel]

Insurgents don't have to properly hack a robot to poison the well. They just need to get a chassis from a destroyed model your forces use able to move and shoot again*, even if only for 5 minutes and via remote control from just round the corner.

All they need is to create the idea in the minds of people that this robot, which a civilian standing nearby cannot know who is really in control, is dangerous and could attack at any time. That sufficiently puts public opinion against you to restrict use of your robots to places well out of sight of civilians, but there you can already just carpet bomb anyway, and that's not where insurgents want to fight anyway.

*perhaps even via just bolting it in place on a street corner, having it shoot some people and then packed with explosives and explode when it's done so a conclusive proof it was a dummy shell is impossible.