“The Automated Battlefield is the real revolution to come out of the Vietnam War. The possibility is that future conflicts will be fought with sensors that signal the enemy presence to computers which order air attacks from pilotless drone helicopters, or ion curtains that zap anything that steps across” Lewis Yablonsky (1972)
The Department of Defense as of 1970 had spent 3.25 Billion (25,382,500,000 / 25.4 B in 2025 dollars) between Stanford and MIT on robotic programs. “… the DoD is not spending money on these programs for nothing.” - from an interview with General William C. Westmoreland in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Think about that dollar figure for a moment in relation to robotic development in 1970.