BEGUN THE CLONE WARS HAVE. I've often wondered why, with battle-droids and Imperial Walkers, the Star Wars movies included live Jedi and Imperial Stormtroopers and free agents shootin' it out with blasters. The battle droids struck me as ways to keep the humans safer.

The military is thinking along similar lines, although that's provoking objections.

According to their proponents—generally the robot’s designers or defense officials—robots will not have any of the pesky weaknesses of flesh-and-blood soldiers.

“They don’t get hungry,” Gordon Johnson, who headed a program on unmanned systems at the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon told the New York Times in 2005. “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.”

Ronald Arkin, a leading roboticist at Georgia Tech, whose research the Defense Department funds, argues without a sense of irony that autonomous robots will be more humane than humans. Atrocities like the massacre by U.S. troops in Haditha, Iraq, would be less likely with robots, he told The Atlanta in November 2007, because they won’t have emotions that “cloud their judgment and cause them to get angry.”

Robots are also promoted as being cost-effective. On top of the annual salary and extra pay for combat duty, the government invests a great deal in recruiting, training, housing and feeding each soldier. Not to mention the costs of healthcare and death benefits, should a soldier be injured or killed.

By comparison, the current $245,000 price tag on SWORDS—which could drop to $115,000 per unit if they are mass-produced—is a steal.

The objection, however, is in the spirit of Gen^l Lee's observation that the terribleness of war keeps its practitioners from growing too fond of it.

A different perspective is gained when the price of the robot is compared with the low-tech, low-cost weaponry that U.S. forces face on a daily basis in Iraq.

“You don’t want your defenses to be so expensive that they’ll bankrupt you,” says Sharon Weinberger, a reporter for Wired’s Danger Room blog. “If it costs us $100,000 to defeat a $500 roadside bomb, that doesn’t sound like such a good strategy—as pretty as it may look on YouTube and in press releases.”

The claim that robots would be more ethical than humans similarly runs contrary to both evidence and basic common sense.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman writes in his 1996 book On Killing that despite the portrayal in our popular culture of violence being easy, “There is within most men an intense resistance to killing their fellow man. A resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.”

One of the most effective solutions to this quandary, the military has discovered, is to introduce distance into the equation. Studies show that the farther the would-be killer is from the victim, the easier it is to pull the trigger. Death and suffering become more sanitized—the humanity of the enemy can be more easily denied. By giving the Army and Marines the capability to kill from greater distances, armed robots will make it easier for soldiers to take life without troubling their consciences.

That is the logic, after all , of the Evil Empire's Death Star. It was also the complaint of the German about the British and U.S. air arms.