I came across this video and i found it interesting. It is about a possible future Russian conflict with the USA using unmanned ground vehicles. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihVszNrz6dQ
Yeah, those little "automated" tanks seem a bit too powerful to be believed. The US could toss up a couple aerial drones, find them, and blast them to bits. WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?
I'm not a military expert but ground warfare I'd think is a little passe for most modern military tactics isn't it? And while this is the fantasy tank battle of the future, the US Navy is actually doing to deploy a ship based laser later this year as well as their electromagnetic rail gun. Yahoo News
But you can't fire over the horizon with rail guns or lasers. That's the reason the Navy went with missiles and planes in the first place.
Whether ground combat is passe depends on whether you need to control an area. If you need to control it, you need boots on the ground. That means ground combat. Denying someone access to an area is, of course, a lot easier: air supremacy and enough bombs will let you blow an area to smithereens and keep everyone out. The US learned the hard way you absolutely need a good ground game in order to get anywhere. What screwed us in Iraq for so long was over-reliance on air power rather than fighting the insurgency down on the ground, face-to-face. A ground war with Russia is pretty far out there in terms of likelihood, in any case.
You need boots on the ground if you want to control a population especially if you are worried that you might be labeled a war criminal. If just want to control an area and don't care about international laws you could inflict enough damage to either kill or force out a significant percentage of the population. You only have to look at America's western expansion to see how it would work.
Regardless, DARPA and the Pentagon have a real life remote controlled autonomous tank as opposed to a simulation. Crusher as the Pentagon calls it. And the LS3 which is best described as a dog like robot goes into field testing this year.