THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

For all the money being thrown at the military, it seems there is one area where they are crucially behind in expensive technology, robotic ground vehicles, soon to be known as RGVs.

The armed forces have lagged on deploying their own versions of unmanned road vehicles, despite goals to create new machines that could be used in place of “boots on the ground” in conflicts. Restrictions on government spending and technological challenges have left the military with virtually no chance of meeting the goal set by Congress to have a third of the military’s combat fleet consist of unmanned vehicles by 2015, military experts said.

The military’s failure to lead the way in self-driving ground vehicles is ironic, given that today’s commercial advances have their roots in research originally sponsored by Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s advanced technology organization. A decade ago, Darpa offered a series of “grand challenges” to private researchers, which helped push the technology forward.

Now General Motors and Nissan said last month they would offer self-driving cars to customers before the end of the decade. Early next year BMW and several other carmakers plan to offer more limited systems that will drive automatically in freeway traffic at low speeds. And Google already has a small fleet of vehicles with more than a half-million miles of automatic driving on California’s freeways.

“Now the automation of vehicles is taking off on the civilian side,” said Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution researcher and author of “Wired for War,” about the development of robot weapons. Mr. Singer predicts that civilian advances will ultimately trickle down to the military, a radical turnaround.

Anyone around in the sixties will remember that the missile gap was a fake used to justify the purchase of lots of new missiles and their delivery systems, like submarines. Reading the rest of the article exposes all the cool toys they want funded.