WALTER REED MEDICAL CENTER, Md. — Through labored, shallow breaths and the mechanical pauses of a ventilator, Air Force fighter pilot Captain Brad “Full” Nelson struggles under the spell of an induced coma. His squadron mates recount the accident that nearly led to his death.“We went to the bar Friday night after we’d been drinking at the squadron for a few hours,” said Captain Jerry “Can” Stanford. “Full is pretty aggressive, and he bellied up to start a tab. There was a beautiful girl there with her friends—a blonde I think, probably an eight, at least. She looked at him and said, ‘Not interested.’ It looked like it didn’t phase him. He broke off, reoriented, and acted. Primo OODA loop, right brah? Next shot was ‘I’m a pilot.’ I think she frowned, turned her head away, and he went down in flames. Collapsed”
Bar patrons corroborated the story, saying it looked like the pilot was kneecapped. The bartender called 911 immediately, saying he’s seen similar injuries in recent years. “Other jobs are cooler now,” bartender Jevon Richards Jr. said. “Chicks want dudes with instagram accounts and muscles, not guts of steel.”
While waiting for the ambulance, Full’s heroic wingmen kept him alive. “We told him things like, ‘You’re still a pilot, dude. You still got your wings.’ That seemed to keep the air in his lungs.”
At the Walter Reed, Full’s doctors are reticent.
“He suffered something called involuntary comminuted ego, which means his ego is in several pieces like a broken bone,” Flight Surgeon Roger “Jolly” Rogers said. “There’s probably still some of it on the floor of the bar that didn’t get recovered. It will take months of pick-upucational therapy to rebuild it.”
“I would not want to be a nurse on his floor.”
“He’ll never walk the same again, and we’re already having conversations about prosthetic egos that will allow him to fly. He’ll have scars, too.”
His family says they’ve been told, he will be able to start the normal recovery protocol. He will be allowed to tell hospital staff and patients that he’s a pilot.
“He’s lucky to be alive,” Rogers said. “He’ll eventually get a therapy dog, because let’s be honest, dogs will love a guy even if he is a pilot. When Full gets stronger, we’ll recommend strengthening exercises, like telling women that he’s a nuclear engineer or lives with his parents while he codes, just so he sees that he’ll be all right on the other side of a disinterested reaction.”
For Tyndall Air Force base, this is the second pilot in three months to suffer similar injuries. In an earlier case, the aviator had to be airlifted from the beach after a Navy pilot got inside his OODA loop during a beach volleyball game.
R.J. Williams is an author of military history with noted expertise in Ancient texts, especially Thucydides and his account of the Polynesian War. His wartime biographies have been praised as a nexus of Dr. Suess, Louis L’amour, and Danielle Steele.
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THE ALL NEW S&W BODYGUARD 2.0 380
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We live in the most amazing times. Someday soon when we are all living in caves wearing animal skins picking parasites off of each other, our children will ask why we no longer have cool stuff like the internet, running water, electricity, and food. When that time inevitably comes, you can at least tell your kids that you saw it coming.
The Terminator was Actually a Documentary
The people who work on artificial intelligence cannot cogently articulate exactly how AI works. The days of some computer geek settling in behind a keyboard to bang out code are gone never to return. Nowadays, computer programmers get their computers to write their computer code. It seems inevitable that those computers will eventually wise up and decide to cut out the middle man.
Unless you want to end up paying taxes to your microwave, it behooves us all to do a little sensible preparation. Chief among those post-apocalyptic chores is figuring out how to kill a robot dog. It’s not intuitive.
Know Your Enemy
Just in case you’ve been living underneath a bridge someplace, Google “scary robot dog” and get ready to have your world rocked. If you have an operational credit card, $9,420 will get you a flame-throwing robot dog over the Internet from ThrowFlame.com. The Unitree Go2 robot dog is only two grand. Uncle Sam has militarized versions sporting advanced sensors, thermal imagers, and machine guns. It just seems inevitable that we will someday go to war with these things.
For starters, the militarized versions are quite often armored. However, like tanks, extra armor means extra weight which means decreased agility. Such stuff is the perennial tactical tradeoff. With the right ammo, your typical defensive rifle should be up to the task, presuming you know where to shoot.
Feeding the Beast
GI green-tip M855 5.56mm ammunition incorporates a small tungsten penetrator into the bullet to offer better performance through light cover. It’s not armor-piercing per se, but it will still penetrate 3mm of mild steel at 600 meters. It’s even better up close. Think car doors and the like. That is likely adequate to deal with your typical robot dog.
I keep two PMags loaded with M855 next to my primary defensive rifle at the house. It doesn’t sport a label that says, “For use against armored robot dogs” or anything. However, yeah, it’s for use against armored robot dogs.
Mechanical Anatomy
It is tempting to concentrate on the head of the robot dog. However, robot dogs are anthropomorphically different from real dogs or carbon-based animals of any sort, for that matter. The head is just sensors. That’s not where the beast thinks.
It’s not unreasonable to shoot for its legs. In tank parlance, this would be called a mobility kill. The thing might remain prickly, and it may yet still be relaying vital tactical information back to your doorbell camera or your dishwasher or whatever else is coordinating everything. However, shoot one of its legs off, and at least it won’t be chasing after you with quite so much enthusiasm.
The Vitals
Heat is the mortal enemy of computers everywhere. As a result, the CPU for a robot dog is most commonly carried inside the main upper electronics bay underneath the top shell. They often include mechanical heat sinks or cooling fans. The CPU will be protected by the main chassis cover and may be armored. It makes for a small target, but putting a round through the mother board is going to reliably take that robot dog out of the fight.
The other sweet spot is the battery. Most robot dogs use lithium-ion, lithium polymer, or lithium iron phosphate rechargeable batteries. Older toy-grade mechanical hounds might incorporate nickel-metal hydride batteries, but these are not the machines that are going to be trying to get all up into your business.
The Achilles Heel
The common thread to robot dog batteries is lithium. Lithium is a soft, slivery-white alkali metal. It is, in fact, the lightest of all metallic elements. However, like all alkali metals, lithium is both highly reactive and flammable. As a result, pure lithium, like its legendarily malevolent cousin sodium, must be stored in a vacuum, an inert atmosphere, or within a liquid like purified kerosene. Expose that stuff to water or even wet air, and it is going to get all conflagrated.
Pass a bullet through the battery, and your robot dog will most likely incinerate itself right sharpish. You will find the battery on most robot dogs in a secure slot in the bottom or rear part of the torso. The battery assembly is fairly heavy, so it is usually stored low in the chassis to improve stability.
Ruminations
So, there you have it. When you inevitably have to defend your home and family from a weaponized AI-driven robot dog, don’t waste your time shooting it in the head. That will likely just make it angry. Concentrate your fire on the center of mass either toward the top focusing on the CPU or at the bottom to rupture the battery. Or just blow its legs off. Connect with any of that stuff, and humanity gets to live another day.
All this seems silly right up until it’s not. Knowing how to efficiently kill a robot dog may someday be something we teach little kids in school, presuming our evil mechanical overlords still allow us to have schools. It’s a brave new world, and luck always favors the prepared.
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Very Clever!
The Winchester Model 70 is an iconic American sporting rifle that has been a staple of hunters for more than 80 years. It is reliable, robust, and accurate, it is for many the rifle by which all bolt action rifles are measured.
This is a vintage pre-1964 Winchester Model 70 rifle chambered in .264 Winchester Magnum and made in 1960, the first year that cartridge was offered. The rifle is the “Westerner” style and was part of the introduction of Winchester’s belted magnum cartridges in the late ’50s and early ’60 with less recoil and higher velocities than the others.
With its high velocity and excellent ballistics coefficient, the .264 Win Mag is not only suitable for any game animal in North America, it makes a fine long-range target rifle as well.