![]() ![]() Because of inertia, budget infighting and an opaque bureaucratic process, the robotic targets had fallen into what the defense world calls the Valley of Death - the chasm between a promising new military technology and its ultimate adoption and employment. Instead, the robots would languish for more than a decade in a protracted series of tests and user evaluations by the Army and Marine Corps. It was, he told POLITICO, “the greatest day of my professional career.” These things will be on every military training range within two or three years, he thought to himself as he drove home that evening. Rarely had he seen any training tool improve a Marine’s proficiency so quickly. Within hours, the shooters improved dramatically and started felling the moving targets with consistency and confidence. Walt Yates, at the time an assistant program manager for range training, was thrilled. ![]() “Because believe it or not, when those targets charge you, it’s freaky.” Another wrote that the robots added a different mental dimension to training: “Marines are engaging a more human-like target which conditions them to the friction of taking life.” “I like how it puts emotion into training,” one Marine evaluator wrote in later test feedback, obtained by POLITICO from a Defense Department source. When the robots lurched toward them, cortisol levels spiked and even seasoned fighters were left shaky and on edge. Engaging these machines felt different, too. When the targets started moving, they started missing, despite their expert marksmanship badges. But the shooters - an array of elite Marine weapons specialists, SEALs and Army special operators - were astonished. (Dougherty’s memo about the Marines’ struggles eventually made its way to a Marathon source, who provided it to POLITICO.) The beige humanoid torsos looked a bit crude with their pasted-on paper faces and costume clothes, and their Segway bases struggled at times to navigate grassy and uneven terrain. It was a fleet of autonomous robotic targets that were human-sized and mounted on moving platforms, made by an Australian company called Marathon and available for evaluation through a Pentagon testing program. It took a few years, but in June 2011, a new military training tool rolled onto a firing range at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. ![]()
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