On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 01:30:28 GMT, "Anthony Garcia"
wrote:



If it were easy to hit troops with self-targeting systems don't you think
the U.S. would be doing it already?

I think the hard thing to do is to avoid incidental civilian
casualties with self-targetting systems.

This is probably enough to scrap the idea in the US, which is public
ally committed to the idea of avoiding avoidable harm to
non-combatants. I'm a little bit cynical as to how this works out in
practice, but I do think that most of the high-ranking staff officers
do try to make battle plans that will minimize civilian casualties.
Probably the main difficulty is that battles don't always follow the
battle plans....

How did I get off on that topic? Anyway, I really don't know how well
the idea would work if bystander casualties were not a concern. It
seems to me that we would not actually know until the idea was built
and tested, and we probably would not really know until it was used in
the field. I think that the intimal development of such weapons would
be prohibitively expensive if it were carried out by a government.
It's possible that some private companies might be able to develop
such weapons at a reasonable cost (and a significant risk that they
would not work after being developed), but it's unclear if they would
perceive the market demand for them to justify the cost and the risk.