By enabling can-on-can violence, might it reduce the level of
slime-on-slime violence? Or would it just ensure that, due to
increasing inability to effectively deny areas, we just become very,
very good at making the rubble bounce?
It's been a long day already. Explain "rubble bounce", please?
Consider go and chess.
In playing go, each player adds to their position, with the idea that
after several plays, their scores will both have improved, but one's
score will have gone up more than one's opponent's.
In playing chess, each player sacrifices materiel, with the idea that
after several plays, both players will have suffered severe losses, but
one's opponent will be down even more than one's own side.
War is like chess in this regard -- it is fundamentally about losing
(but seeking glory in losing less than one's adversary).
One idea of automated warfare is the "electronic chess" concept, in
which robots blow each other up and humans (other than perhaps the ones
who had such poor taste as to have been living in the conflict zone)
are spared.
A different idea is that it will merely increase the level of violence.
In much the same way that locals running amok prompted the US army to
switch (rewolwers?) from .38 to .45 -- pure momentum transfer having
been the order of the day -- rather than simply bombing things to
rubble, mission planners may, if faced with exotic weapons platforms,
feel the need to deliver enough kinetic energy to an area to ensure not
only that it is reduced to rubble, but that the rubble gets bounced
around a time or three.
I have no clue which way things might go; there are always strange side
effects when technology changes. For example, back when Britannia
Ruled the Waves, they did so on wind-power and drinking-water and could
restock around the world for arbitrarily long cruises. These days
maintaining a blue-water navy requires either lots of floating nukes or
a steady supply of oil, with all the attendant strategic consequences
either way.
-Dave
