It was in the 60’s and 70’s that I would read paperback compilations of Sci-Fi stories that explored violent futures in which humans battled using powerful machines that they controlled remotely. Often, those machines were linked to the operator by neural connections that gave the operator’s brain control of the machine’s workings as if the machine parts were the operator’s eyes, arms, legs, and so on. Later, Sci-Fi movies would reimagine WarMechs as robotic weapons. The Yeagers in the Pacific Rim movie series give us a cinematic sense of WarMechs, but these machines are manned directly rather than remotely.
Like the Star Trek communicator that became the modern smart phone, the WarMechs have become modern drones. UAVs – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are the WarMechs of the modern airspace battlefield. But they are not the only WarMechs. Marine biologists have used Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) to map the ocean floor, survey ocean-based human structures, and to study the life-forms of the deep. These were conceived as research vessels rather than as weapons, but let’s be honest, there is no tech so innocuous that it can’t be perverted for use in war.
The recent explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge may have been caused by a remotely controlled UUV – a maritime drone. If so, kudos to the pro-Ukraine forces that made it happen. The marine WarMechs have arrived.