Will the Marine Corps be Ready or Stay in the Starting Block?
Dave Pinion
War will always remain a violent clash of wills as described by Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 (MCDP-1); however advances in technology will soon shift the primary instruments that carry out the clash of wills from humans to automated systems. Up to this point, the fundamental purpose behind military technology has been to enable human cognition to employ weapons ever more effectively against the enemy. In contrast, future military technology will be employed by artificial cognition in various forms against the enemy with humans somewhere in the loop. Just as machine guns, chemical weapons, tanks, submarines and airplanes changed the character of war during World War One, disruptive technologies such as additive manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advanced robotics are changing the character of war as we know it. Accordingly, if the Marine Corps is to remain a lethal and resilient force in the future, it must make radical changes to its programmed force and begin to confront the legal, moral, and technological issues that will accompany the development of emerging technology.
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/will-marine-corps-be-ready-or-remain-starting-block
