On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 05:26:01 GMT, Kevin Brooks wrote:

I think there are two issues here. The first is when the sensor is
attached to the weapon, as it is in a sensor in a missile. Here,
there is no sensor/shooter cycle, unless you choose to have a human
involved in the decision to fire.

That is way beyond even our capabilities. You are talking autonomous combat
systems.

Yes. The progrsamming for this isn't particularly hard, once you've
written software that can identify a vehicle (or other target) in a
picture. It's just a matter of aiming the missile towards the
target.

Weapons like this were in existance 20 years ago, for example the
Exocet anti-ship missile. I'm not bsure what problems you envisage
with doing this; perhaps you could elaborate?

because you can't just fire them "in that direction, more or less", and hit
anything--you have to have a pretty narrow determination of where the target
is right at the time the weapon arrives.

What you could do is have the missile, if it doesn't find a target
to hang around in the area looking for one. (The British ALARM
missile does this literally :-)).

Now if you want to send a flock of
CM's out and about to go on a hunter-killer mission, you have some real
problems to confront, like: (a) How do you prevent fratricide or targeting
of the local version of the Sanford garbage truck (remember that not every
enemy is going to be able to discount collateral damage like the insurgents
we are no facing in Iraq do)?

You can't prevent fratricide all the time, and most countries would
have a higher tolerance from losses caused by friendly fire than
most western countries do. The missile would know (at least
approximately - within a few km) were it is, and therefore whether
it is over land occupied by its own side.

Discriminating between military and civilian vehicles is a lot
harder, I agree.

(b) Are you going to send it in low, where it
MIGHT have a chance at surviving, but its field of view is extremely
limited, so it is that much more likely to not find any target to hit, but
which also requires oodles of (very accurate, and likely unavailable to most
potential foes) digital topographic data to be uploaded and a complex
navigation system)

The topographic data would probably be available if the missile is
flying over the territory of its own country.

Otherwise, there are other methods of nagivation: dead reckoning,
celestial, a LORAN-like system could be set up.

or up high where the view is better,

It's possible that a mission might require some of the flight to be
at high level and some at low level. I imagine the missiles could
be programmed for a mission by sticking a computer with an Ethernet
cable into a slot on the missile.

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