The United States has been at a "war on terror" since 2001, in which this war continues until the present day with renewed promises to exit our war in Afghanistan, but since this is a "war on terror", the countries, the objectives, and the tasks can be re-defined to suit the present or future administrations for their wars. Especially disappointing is that during the Republican Bush administration there was plenty of anti-war protests, but during the Democratic Obama administration these protests have either disappeared or become severely muted. Importantly, the military has changed since the Vietnam war, in which at that time, conscription was mandated by law, while this did not necessarily mean that you would be drafted to fight in a war, as there were opportunities for deferments and exemptions for males subject to the Selective Service System, it did mean that you could be compelled to be drafted, and that most definitely there were draftees that served in Vietnam that were either killed or wounded. Our military forces are now all-volunteer and the state-of-the-art sophistication of their equipment, their logistics, and their weapons, have reduced fatalities of our soldiers to surprisingly low rates. Because of this fact and despite being at war overseas for a considerable number of years, the American public can apparently accept these engagements if our men and women suffer relatively few in casualties, consequently it is an important objective of the military-industrial complex to continue to work in ways in which our fatalities and injuries will be minimized going forward.
Robotics appears to be the perfect solution for our military adventures in which rather than putting soldiers into harm's way, we can instead use robotic surveillance, robotic equipment, and robotic weapons to augment or to replace boots on the ground. Like most ideas, there are some very good reasons to want to use robotic equipment, such as sending in a robot into what appears to be an abandoned warehouse to verify that there are no humans inside or to confirm that a particular object within said warehouse is not a mine or explosive device. However, robotics and their increasing sophistication carries with it some heavy moral costs, as there is an impressionable difference between pulling the actual trigger of a weapon, yourself, as opposed to pressing a key on your keyboard. The taking of any human life, should never be lightly regarded, and the taking of any human life in which the human mind has been taken out of the equation, such as programming a weapon to automatically fire at what appears to be humans who have violated a certain defense space is unacceptable.
Atomic weapons have not been utilized since World War II, and biological and chemical weapons have been banned from warfare. It is imperative that we get ahead of the curve in regards to robotic weapons and set the standards for their usage in warfare. It is terrible thing when one man kills another man in the combat of war, it is an even worse thing when a machine under the instructions or the input of a man does the same killing, and it is the end of civilization as we know it, if machines are purposely programmed to kill humans in which the machines appetite for destruction will never be satiated or satisfied.