I still remember the first time I had “The Nightmare”…
When I was around three years old, I was living in a haunted old farmhouse in Maryland. We had a barn, a few horses, and a couple of crabapple trees. The floors creaked, the walls bowed, and the trees scratched the windows menacingly with their quivering claw hands.
When I went to sleep, I was often scared.
The basement — which I had only dared to venture into but two or three times — was filled with spiders, mice, and blacksnakes. Our outdoor well was a 20-foot-deep black pit that gave us our water, but also bred all types of unseen demons that I couldn’t begin to identify. But I could hear them…
One memorable day, my uncle Charlie made the calculated risk of sliding open the well-cover and unleashing the snakes.
They began to slither up the well, and then the nearby tree like some sort of hellish vines.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
My uncle disposed of them one by one with a shotgun. I’ll never forget the sights and sounds of that day. It’s burned into my brain for time immemorial.
It was that night that I first had “The Nightmare”…
The nightmare began with a feeling of doom. The winds blew, the moon was swept under the dark clouds, and my heartbeat was echoing into my pillow. It sounded like troops marching towards some unforeseen calamity…
But what was the object of this terrible nightmare? Ghouls, goblins, vampires?
No, it was a robot.
A massive robot stomping across my front yard, while leaves covered the sky like locusts in a biblical tale. I found myself alone and afraid on my front porch. Mercifully, in the dream, there was a gauntlet of slatted tin trash cans festooned upon the yard.
I ran.
Dream Jimmy flipped over the first can and hid inside. I breathed deep and waited for the right time. I then leapt from can to can, hiding myself from the giant robot. To this day, I can hear the robot’s throbbing footsteps approaching my tiny metal bunkers.
CLACK, THUMP, CLACK, THUMP.
Like most nightmares, I thankfully woke up at the very moment the giant robot was about to flip over the can in which I was trembling. However, it’s become a reoccurring nightmare; I’ve had the exact same one dozens of times since then.
So it should be no surprise that I’ve been rather terrified of robots ever since. And while it wasn’t the best introduction to robots, I’ve learned to respect them.
And the stuff of my nightmares could be an absolute dream for investors right now…
As in my nightmares, robots are still able to strike fear into anyone they encounter. But they do it precisely and purposefully.
Sending ground troops into distant lands has long lost its luster. It’s politically unpopular, economically inefficient, and rather simple to replace with the right blend of troops and robots.
And it’s making certain robotics companies a lot of money along the way.
In the 2017 budget proposal, $4.61 billion was earmarked for drone spending alone. That doesn’t take into account the “Black Budget”, which refers to classified government spending on military operations and intelligence. That number is assuredly much higher…
From Bloomberg:
From the spears hurled by Romans to the missiles launched by fighter pilots, the weapons humans use to kill each other have always been subject to improvement. Militaries seek to make each one ever-more lethal and, in doing so, better protect the soldier who wields it. But in the next evolution of combat, the U.S. Army is heading down a path that may lead humans off the battlefield entirely.
Over the next few years, the Pentagon is poised to spend almost $1 billion for a range of robots designed to complement combat troops. Beyond scouting and explosives disposal, these new machines will sniff out hazardous chemicals or other agents, perform complex reconnaissance and even carry a soldier’s gear.
“Within five years, I have no doubt there will be robots in every Army formation,” said Bryan McVeigh, the Army’s project manager for force protection. He touted a record 800 robots fielded over the past 18 months. “We’re going from talking about robots to actually building and fielding programs,” he said. “This is an exciting time to be working on robots with the Army.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, many economists are even calling this the “second machine age.” All told, it adds up to a whopping $127.3 billion.
You can make a killing on companies that are focusing on these advancements. In fact, my colleague Jason Simpkins has been beating the war drum on these technologies for a while now…
He has found a defense company that could show you how to make nine times your money on its unstoppable technology in the robot space. It’s a complete revolution in defense technology that we’ve always heard about in sci-fi movies, but has never been as real as it is today…
Defense robots are on the ground: they inspect the bottoms of trucks, they automatically patrol the base perimeter, they search roads, bridges, and culverts for explosives, and they autonomously drive entire convoys, dig trenches, construct barricades, and generally make life easier for our soldiers.
Defense robots are in the water: they’re used to scout everything from the high seas to arctic ice flows, unmanned submarines are used to look for enemy subs and to intercept torpedoes, they’re driving automatic Coast Guard patrol boats into dangerous or remote areas, they’re used in automated naval defense systems and defense robots are used to create new defense training scenarios for our aircraft carriers.
In short, the robot military revolution is upon us.
As scary as it sounds, it’s nothing if not impressive and profitable.
