Jack of Harts

I put another story in the can today. It was a major rework of an existing story. I figured it would just take a minor tweak. It was more a major revision. I once again asked Grok to analyze once done and it did good. Some rabbit holes again. It really doesn’t like my style of emphasizing certain points or character thoughts. It also really doesn’t like me writing the character looking into people’s eyes to see if they are shocked or fearful or whatever. But it does good with other stuff. It is certainly a good tool to use to check for weaknesses in a story. I like it.

On this day, before most of us were born, uncommon valor filled uncommon men and they rode into hell. It is my prayer that their equal be found in this generation.

Is the future of the combat infantryman coming to an end? Some say it is.

The proliferation of flying drones and robot dogs in full-scale combat in Ukraine, and the bipedal robots that are starting to move more and more like humans in live demonstrations, suggest that there will come a day soon when the standard combat infantryman may no longer be needed. As long as we can maintain the tech advantage and not lose control of the drones, we can get eyes on target anywhere on the globe with these drones, and then send a kill or not kill order instantly. And the people in charge won’t even worry about whether the trigger puller will fire or not. You don’t have to worry about a drone refusing orders to shoot. Which would make them perfect at dealing with domestic citizens that the government has decided are a threat. You don’t have to worry about them having Constitutional objections to shooting people.

But not even counting that little “positive” for those in charge, the drones are getting fast enough that the combat infantrymen in Ukraine are having trouble dealing with them. And as we have seen in and around Ukraine, the drones can be very effective. They’ve sunk the Russian Black Sea fleet. And they just nailed a large part of the Russian strategic bombing force with drones. Drones are obviously one of the weapons of our future. But they might just replace the combat infantryman in a lot of roles. I don’t think the infantryman will be gone, but drones will take up much of their roll I think.

In my Jack of Harts universe, that has happened. Robots lead the way into heavy combat in Jack of Harts, and the cybers and AIs running them consider it their jobs to take the shots that would otherwise hit a human. They expect to take robot casualties and prefer it that way. Its a lot easier to rebuild a robot than to fix a critically wounded human after all. In our real world, expect something like that to happen. Much as it is now with the robot dogs that are often our first look into a bad area. Or they act as the modern pack animal for a squad. However it works out, I expect a major change in the nature of the combat infantryman going forward. Not that I think humans in the role will go away. But I think they will be much more heavily supplemented and vanguarded by more and more drones and robots as time goes forward.