Got a Real World Weapons or Armour Question? Mk X

[Yora]

Robots really only work for surveilance and fire support. (And yes, for poking strange things that nobody else wants to poke.) And that job they actually do very efficiently because machines can ignore many of needs of human opperators. If it's remote controlled, you can simply switch the opperator without having to get the robot back to base.

But the reason you need people on the ground is because there's a lot of things to do which are not pointing a cammera or making something explode.
As of now, robots have very severe limitations in regard to reliable mobility. On clean pavement or even solid concrete stairs they work fine. But the whole point is that you have to get them into situation where there is going to be lots of rubble and other obstructions. And quite often you want to avoid blasting a clear path through whatever is in your way and inside just climb over something ore carefully move it out of the way. Robots might eventually get there, but that would still be many decades in the future.

And even more importantly, you need people to interact with the locals, with conventional battlefield out in wide open spaces disappearing. You can't do that with robots.

What I would expect is to see unit sizes getting smaller in number and replace the removed soldiers with some kinds of heavy duty firepower robots. Instead of having a group of 8 soldiers doing a patrol or whatever, you have 4 soldiers and two 2,5 meter combat robots. If you need firepower and keeping your head low, you let the robots take the brunt of the work and while you're guarding, on patrol, or scouting, they just follow behind letting the soldiers deal with the talking and deciding on a course of action.