New Anti-Insurgency Weapon

New Anti-Insurgency Weapon

Artificial Intelligence is getting better and better. Now they have little vacuum cleaners that can go about the house, cleaning up, even removing empty beer cans and such. The same principle can be applied to ‘cleaning up’ hostile territories – send little machines out to shoot anybody that carries a gun, wears some form of hostile uniform, whatever it takes. If they do not accidentally kill off entire Wedding Parties then they would be better than what we have going now.

Anyway, I was thinking that Flying Robots would be better than ground deployed robot units, mostly because it could be anticipated that the robot machines would eventually break down, and would fall into enemy hands… the Insurgents would be able to scrap the Machines out for the little guns and cameras and stuff. We wouldn’t want that.

So little Airplane Models with small caliber guns, especially at night. Larger Mother Planes circling above could acquire targets and then release the smaller weaponized models to glide down quietly, very close to their targets, and make head shots, rev up and fly away, back up to the Mother Ship. We could call them ‘Killer Bees’ or some such charming thing.

But the engineering complexities kept bothering me… especially the little guns. It would still be possible that maintenance failures could put all such stuff into Enemy Hands. Then there is recoil. Guns have recoil… and engineers hate recoil, especially aerodynamics engineers… a plane in a slow glide can be stopped dead in its tracks by recoil. All sorts of algorithms would have to be set in place to allow for all that stupid recoil. And, besides, gun shots are so noisy. The first gun shot alerts everybody, and Attacks would therefore have to be limited to small attrition raids… killing a few Insurgents before all the rest run to take cover. Yes, repeated endlessly every night, eventually even attrition raids take their toll. But More is always Better, no?

Suddenly it occurred to me that the High Altitude Mother Plane only needs to drop small non-explosive Smart Bomblettes. The Smart Bomblettes could be built to be narrow and with slender teardrop aerodynamics with just small steering wings and rudders, with a little GPS Module and Camera Eye that could keep a Target acquired and centered… the circuit would be no more complicated than the Jitter Eliminator in every Japanese Video Cam now on the market. Dropped from an altitude of a few thousand feet, the Smart Bomblette would steer itself downward, building up speed, to clunk the Terrorist over his head, killing him instantly, and relatively noiselessly, that is, compared to a gun shot.

Just how fast could one of these things go, without any rocket propulsion? Hmmmm… the formula for Gravitational Acceleration eventually runs into the wall of Wind Resistance Drag, but I’m guessing that a slim teardrop projectile with just the barest control stubs would be able to hit 240 miles per hour or about 350 feet per second. That would make for fairly significant clunk on the head… even if one is wearing a big wooly Turban.

They would be cheap enough to build – mass produced IR Camera Arrays wouldn’t be too expensive (regular cameras could be used for Day Light Fair Weather versions of the Weapon… to save money where money could be saved), and then several small circuit boards, and some servo motors and controls with a lithium battery. And once they hit target, or hit the ground, well, there would be nothing salvageable after that kind of impact, or even if captured intact, of what use could it be to somebody on the ground?

Also, the advantage that the Smart Bomblettes would have over the small glider killer bees is that the Bomblettes could be used Day or Night. During the day, the Mother Plane would have to fly a bit higher to avoid observation or vulnerability to small arms fire, but nobody would be able to see the actual bomblettes being dropped… really, they should not be any larger than maybe six inches long… as long as a dollar bill. The only way the Insurgents could avoid such a Weapons System would be to never leave their Caves… supplies would eventually run thin, and the Insurgents would be starved out. Oh, I guess the Bomblettes could also be programmed for clunking Donkeys and Camels over the head… to interrupt the Insurgents ability to keep their Supply Lines going over rough terrain.

Nowadays they use “Predator” style Unmanned Drone Planes… but these continue to require some Operator Input. I can’t imagine that they are not largely computerized, and that the so-called Operator is there only for Appearance Sake (Machines don’t kill people… People kill people… especially those Wedding Parties), but it really needs to be emphasized that the State of the Art for Artificial Intelligence is now at a level sophisticated enough to allow for Seek and Destroy Weapon’s Systems. The Mother Plane Models I spoke of can be programmed to patrol a certain sector and then to come back when it has run out of fuel or Bomblettes. Solar Power panels could be used to keep them up almost indefinitely, that is, they would only have to return to base to pick up more Bomblettes. But, adding another level of Sophistication, there is no reason why such Model Planes could not be re-supplied by docking up, in the air, with even larger Models that could easily enough simply dump more Bomblettes into the smaller Model’s storage bin, and add more fuel as may be necessary, just as the Big Planes are now refueled in the air so they are not always having to return to base but can stay over the Tactical Area until the pilots are too exhausted to continue. But with Artificial Intelligence, there would not really ever be a reason to have the Model Planes return to base…Machines don’t tire nearly as easily or regularly as People do. Artificial Intelligence Weapons could keep operational 24/7, as they say.