The military interests in these machines seem to go in the direction of what you could call drones on the ground.
Invading an area on the ground is still necessary to occupy and maintain control. Air-based drones are used more for targeted attacks and assasinations, with documented collateral damage, or killing and terrorizing of civilian populations put less eloquently.
With drones on the ground, the situation changes completely, and you can have much more control over areas without putting any soldiers lives at risk.
This would make occupations much more cost effective, probably mostly in the PR sense, any government getting lots of their youth killed will sooner or later have a problem at home. Not so much with drones.
I' more impressed with the agile ability of the technology. But it does remind me of the mechanical hound from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
"The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws.
"Nights when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the hound and let loose rats in the fire house areaway. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentle paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine."
Invading an area on the ground is still necessary to occupy and maintain control. Air-based drones are used more for targeted attacks and assasinations, with documented collateral damage, or killing and terrorizing of civilian populations put less eloquently.
With drones on the ground, the situation changes completely, and you can have much more control over areas without putting any soldiers lives at risk.
This would make occupations much more cost effective, probably mostly in the PR sense, any government getting lots of their youth killed will sooner or later have a problem at home. Not so much with drones.
I find this a very frightening development.