Rapid Network

What happens when the United States military has to very quickly redeploy its assets to another part of the world? We have an incredible air mobility command, we have the US Navy, and we have government contract carriers, and shipping companies which will do our bidding in a heartbeat. We can move anything anywhere on this planet in a very short proximity of time. However, there are challenges with all this, and I'd like to speak to some of those challenges for a few moments.

First, when it comes to military vehicles we must understand that vehicles leaving the Middle East are painted desert-shades of color for camouflage. However, if they are going to Southeast Asia, they will need to be painted to match a greener environment, just as if they were dispatched to the middle part of Africa. If they were dispatched into the far north, they might need a white paint job to match the snow and ice. Can you imagine the difficulty in painting 10 or 20,000 vehicles in a short timeframe?

Yes, we can probably get the paint, but we may not have the manpower to get it done in a very short amount of time. I recommend that we use painting robots, these robots can rapidly reconfigure the paint schemes for camouflage on these vehicles reentering and redeploying to a different battlespace. How might this work you ask? Well, consider if you will a very quickly corrected system like a carwash tunnel. First the vehicles could go through and the paint could be stripped off, and treated with an etching compound.

Then they could drive through another tunnel for a once over using a robotic system with optical flow sensors, sonar, and artificial intelligence to put just the right amount of paint in the right areas. Is this feasible you ask? Sure it is, and it also saves manpower, and the risk of having military personnel or contract workers getting into an unfortunate situation around toxic chemicals and paint. By alleviating the health risks, and increasing the speed at which we clean, strip, and paint these military assets, we can save a ton of money for the taxpayer.

If the global community expects us to be the police force of the world, and if we mobilize in assisting our allies against our enemies, then we will forever need to move around tanks, trucks, Humvees, and other ground-based military assets. So we need an easier way to rapidly re-camouflage these vehicles. This is why I believe robots are the answer. Please consider all this and think on.