Bunker wars

Another article about use of telerobots in contemporary warfare makes an interesting point:

"would the enemy be forced to look for ways to hit back at the operators located in their home countries? Considering that the operators are running their robots from within buildings and facilities around populated areas, wouldn't that classify them as hiding behind human shields and subjecting their own civilian populations to retaliation for a war they are remotely fighting on the other side of the globe?"

It's safe to assume that future military telesupervisors will be buried deep underground in bunkers which are inaccessible even to the so-called "bunker busting" bombs. If minimisation of civilian casualties is the main aim then you might imagine that these bunkers will be constructed in the middle of unpopulated areas. But there's a tension here between administrative convenience and protection of civilians. Telesupervisors need to be able to commute to their bunker and back again on a daily, or otherwise quite frequent basis, so the bunkers probably can't be located too far away from cities. The opposite strategy, as the article suggests, would be to use cities as a sort of human shield, with telesupervisory bunkers situated directly beneath them. Presumably attacking cities with semi-autonomous or autonomous robots will be somewhat politically unacceptable - at least initially - since this would resemble something close to a real terminator scenario even if negligible artificial intelligence is involved and the machines are just acting like agents within a real time strategy game.

Having robots just fight other robots does seem fairly pointless. You might as well have the leaders of rival nations play a game of chess in order to decide who is the winner. So the primary objectives in future wars will probably be not only to neutralise incoming robots but also to cut off or jam the line of communications between the bunkered telesupervisors and the robotic armies which they administrate, with the civilian population sandwiched somewhere in the middle.