If you're not fielding, you're failing'.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Technology Tomorrow

Retired Army Gen. Rick Lynch came to the National Defense Industrial Association's Ground Robotics Capabilities conference in Springfield, Virginia, on his own dime because he still cares about this life-saving technology.

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As a former combatant commander who led troops in the bloodiest years of the Iraq War--who also has a master's degree in robotics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--he emerged before retirement as a forceful proponent of fielding ground robots. If the Army had fielded autonomous convoys, robotic combat vehicle wingmen, remote weapon stations and other such technologies, many of the soldiers in his command who lost their lives would have come home, he has said.

Melissa L. Flagg, deputy assistant secretary of defense at the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics' research directorate, came to the conference to pinch-hit for her boss, Stephen Welby, one of the Defense Department's point men for the so-called "third offset strategy." The concept calls for a new wave of disruptive technology that will leapfrog the battlefield capabilities of peer competitors. Robotics and autonomy are two of the strategy's key technologies.

Flagg displayed a PowerPoint slide that showed these capabilities being fielded in the mid-2020s. Lynch had seen several similar slides at the conference and indeed, over the past 15 years, where ground robots on the battlefield are always seemingly a decade away on someone's technology roadmap.

This resulted in a testy exchange between the two, that not only speaks to the fundamental debate on ground robots, but applies to many of the so-called "weapons of the future," which are always not quite ready to be fielded--for one reason or another.

The discussion was as follows:

Lynch: "I hate slides like this so let me tell you why. As we speak, there are service members in harm's way across the world that don't need to be in harm's way. I commanded a division in combat where 153 of my soldiers died, 800 more came back in pieces and many of them were in places they didn't need to be because technology could have taken them out of harm's way.

"So my argument is always: we can do stuff sooner rather than later. The Germans had a robot on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. It has been out there before..."

Flagg: "That is why we have 'the present' on the chart. We're doing this stuff right now. I mean we've got helicopters we can send in...