The Enlightened Despot

For the most part, the battle over the future of the defense budget will take place out of the public eye - people care a lot about broad rhetoric on national defense, but they don’t know anything about the details that matter. Still, to the extent that marshalling public opinion matters, it’s important not to underestimate the primitive appeal of neat weapons. If you explain to someone that the F-22 Raptor is the snazziest, most fearsome fighter jet ever made, they want to believe that it’s important for us to have a lot of them. We want to have much cooler toys than the Russians.

In light of that fact, it’s worth emphasizing that a leaner military, geared more toward counterinsurgency, would also have cool toys. In fact, I’d argue that a lot of these tools are cooler than fighter jets, on top of being orders of magnitude less expensive. And on top of all that, unlike the fighters, we actually get to use them.

Take, for example, the unfortunately named Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS), pictured above. Drones are getting something of a bad rap these days, perhaps because of fears that they will enslave us all, but more likely because of their use in controversial strikes in Pakistan. This is crazy. Reasonable men may differ on the wisdom of going after the Taliban in Warizistan, but there is no question that these strikes would be much more unpopular with the Pakistanis if life human beings were crossing the border. And none of that has any bearing on the overall utility of drones.

People also object to the indiscriminate nature of anti-terrorism via Hellfire missiles. Enter the ARSS (they really need to do something about that name):

The Army’s solution is the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS), a small, unmanned helicopter equipped with a powerful .338-caliber rifle. An autopilot system handles the tricky business of flying while the operator lines up the kill shot on a remote monitor.

The Army ground-tested the rifle’s turret on a Vigilante unmanned helicopter to evaluate its accuracy. The turret-control hardware and flight-control algorithms will be refined to make shots more accurate before airborne testing begins in July. The program’s heads say the airborne robo-sniper idea was put forward five years ago, but only became practical when Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory designed a lightweight, stabilized turret. Users control it with an adapted Xbox 360 controller. The same turret could be used on unmanned fixed-wing aircraft such as the Predator or Reaper and could also allow ground robots to fire on the move.

An Xbox controller! Flying a stealth jets might be a good subject for a video game, but real-life deployment of the flying robo-sniper actually doubles as a video game. And unlike winning dogfights, firing bullets rapidly and accurately at people surrounded by civilians is something we actually need to do in the fight against the Taliban. And it works against pirates, too!