ABSTRACT
In April 2016, a search for drone warfare on Google returned almost 550,000 results, while Amazon.com listed 205 book titles. The proliferation of scholarly and popular writings on the topic directly reflects the explosive growth of unmanned aerial vehicles over the last two decades. Over the last two decades, the roles played by unmanned systems have proliferated greatly. Given the US lead in unmanned technologies, considerable advances in military robotics should be expected in the near future. Innovations will enable the next generation of air, land, and underwater unmanned autonomous systems (UASs), loaded with greater arrays of more sophisticated, smaller, and lower power-consuming equipment, to perform new missions. Unmanned systems hardly influence the essence of what it means to be an infantryman, marine, or seaman because they are simply recognized as cost-effective and risk-reducing force multipliers. Maybe one day, war will look like a duel between autonomous machines that do combat better than humans.
