Fire and Forget

Is this a good idea?

What it is, is… a system that you attach to a… thing (like the truck above) and it senses high-speed incoming projectiles, blows them up in mid-air and directs a hail of bullets at wherever the projectile came from…

… all in a microsecond, and without human intervention. Automated killing machine etc. I can imagine a bird flying through the air – trips the system and is vapourized, at exactly the same time as it’s nest, some distance away is turned into a small cloud of spiralling feathers and bits of straw.

It’s one of those things that once it’s invented, it can’t be uninvented… and it can’t not be used. “It saves lives”. It also represents a quantum (being too small a word) leap in whatever arms-race is headed this way – for systems that fight and kill at faster than human reaction speeds.

And I don’t think we’ve ever seen that before – except maybe with landmines… and I’m not sure that it’s not a genie that one day we might wish we could put back in the bottle. But we can’t… What Darpa (for it is they) have done here is (merely) throw a hell of a lot of money and expertise at a “toy” that you can find umpteen dozen variations of on youtube. People are already making their own automated paintball weapons systems in their backyards. Not good enough to shoot down incoming shells of course (and maybe that will never come), but probably good enough to splatter an armoured car with paint, before being shot to kingdom come.

I’ve got this weird vision of war… which is played entirely as a game (in other people’s countries) where people actually pay to fight, remotely. The manufacturing of the weapons is outsourced to local sweatshops etc… and the weapons are all a bit shit (plastic toys really) – but it doesn’t matter because if you can mobilise 150,000 bored teenage video-game ninjas who don’t actually die when you shoot them down, but simply launch the next drone… then things like aircraft-carriers or helicopters might be… well, as effective as a battle-axe against a swarm of bees. A physical denial-of-service attack. You probably don’t need that many bees.