It's now taken for granted that troops use UAVs such as the Predator for aerial surveillance in combat. They're unmanned, but not autonomous.

Now it sounds as if UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) are gaining usage, and according to Wired, 18 units are due to be deployed to Iraq in the spring. They're basically 2 1/2 foot tall robots on treads, with a tripod mount for a machine gun.

Says GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike:

"This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite nightmarish. On the one hand, this could make our flesh-and-blood soldiers so hard to get to that traditional war -- a match of relatively evenly matched peers -- could become a thing of the past," he said. "But this might also rob us of our humanity. We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes."

Bill Maher raised hackles when he said that using cruise missiles was cowardly. Fuck that.

If we can fight wars with mechanical proxies and not have to send our troops physically into harms way, if it's our bots verses their flesh, I'm all for it.

That's not cowardice, it's common sense.