http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050122-110503-5561r.htm
There is much debate in the defense community about the military and its role in present and future conflict. These debates range from policy and fiscal arguments in the echoing halls of the Pentagon to the fierce blogs about strategy and tactics in Iraq.
In the midst of these debates, the US Army is making a quite movement toward the future of the United States military and its ability to continue to maintain itself as a global presence in a growingly hostile world. That movement is the fielding of 18 SWORDS remote control robots to Iraq.
SWORDS stands for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, but it also stand for the future of combat for the US Military. SWORDS is not technically a robot so much as a remote controlled weapons system, one that can be used by a combat soldier to detect and engage the enemy far out of the enemy’s range to do harm to the soldier.
What SWORDS means for the modern battlefield is the advent of the ‘standoff’ weapon on the tactical battlefield. SWORDS is the first step toward a military where the bulk of the fighting, from deep reconnaissance to risky building clearing missions will be done by remotely controlled or independent unmanned weapons platforms capable of delivering the full effect of our military force while reducing the need to put valuable and highly trained soldiers in harms way unnecessarily.
Unfortunately, the SWORDS program, like most innovative programs in the Department of Defense, is under-funded, timidly applied, and too late to be applied when it was needed most during the Iraq conflict, but hopefully, this same program will show the way for future US combat forces and will help ensure that the US military remains the dominant fighting force in the 21st century.
For those who are looking for the radical reform of the Department of Defense and its subordinate departments and agencies, SWORDS is a glimmer of hope that the future might yet happen after all.
DLK 20050125
20050207: I just saw an piece on Fox News about the SWORDS weapons system. The future is coming. Are we ready?
