Wired for warP.W. SingerPublished in 2009SAM COLLINS

Wired for WarWired for war is a book that explores how robotics is changing the way that we live life. Robots are slowly becoming a massive part of our everyday lives.

But P.W. Singer focuses mostly on the area where the change is the most apparent, and that is the battlefield.

He focuses on how the new technologies are affecting the way that we fight wars, and how it will make war never be the same again.

Wired for War

Some of these robots seem almost too futuristic to be possible with our current technology

One of them being the BEAR bot which is a military field robot that picks up wounded soldiers and will carry them to the back line for medical treatment There are also other robots which will go out to wounded soldiers and send live video back to the doctors in the hospital. It can also administer pain killers and IV’s

Another example of this amazing technology is the CRAM system. What this does is it targets and shoots down Mortars and Rockets. But what is so amazing about it is the speed in which it does so. It can seek out the target, lock on, and destroy the target in the time that it would take a human to say look ou-The average human being takes around 0.3 seconds to respond to an outside stimulus. The CRAM system will lock on to a projectile in just about 0.01 seconds.

Not even look out just look ou-

Another example is the SWORD robot. Which is basically a moving platform with weapons mounted on it. Which can range from sniper rifles, to heavy machine guns, to rocket launchers.

Besides the medical robot and the CRAM the book focuses on bomb disposal robots and many different types of drones.

There were no real strong connections between the book and what we covered in class. But there was one connection that I found which was hacking. Any of these highly advanced and weaponized robots can be hacked, and if hacked turned against the very troops who use them. In class we talked about cyber warfare. Well, in the book cyberwar and hacking are a big deal. But not exactly in the same way as we discussed in class. Cyberwar fare would not take place in nuclear facilities but instead on an actual battlefield with robots and humans.

Wired for War

Would I recommend this book?

Definitely, I really enjoyed it a lot, some of the robots that he describes are simply mind boggling. And the technology behind it is even more amazing.