Supply & Demand Chain Executive (I confess I did not previously know such a publication existed — did you?) has a brief story that the military is interested in autonomous vehicles.
No surprise there. After all, it was the DARPA Grand Challenge that kicked off the autonomous vehicle revolution.
But this line struck me:
“According to [Undersecretary of Defense Michael] Griffin, 52 percent of casualities in combat zones are attributed to military personnel delivering food, fuel and other logistics.”
The post doesn’t break out what portion of those causalties come from logistics personal who are attacked, versus just plain old vehicle collisions. But it’s plausible that a lot are due to collisions that don’t involve troops being directly under attack.
It’s kind of like the statistic that more Civil War soldiers died from disease than enemy combat. Sometimes it’s the things we don’t think about that are the most dangerous.
David Silver 