Tech from the upcoming Future War novel, KOBANI...
Meet Brutus, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3) 'Hunter'. Powered by a 125kw hydrogen fuel cell which makes up the bulk of its weight, it can do 60 miles per hour across firm flat ground, or 15-20 across rugged terrain. At walking speed it has an endurance of 4-6 hours.
The interchangeable frontal payload attachment can be fitted with projectile weapons, tear gas or a grenade launcher, even a harpoon for pulling open wooden or light metal doors like car doors. Or it could be fitted with manipulator arms, that enable the LS3 to do everything from pin a man’s hand to the ground, grab his throat, open a door or window by the handle, pick up and move an explosive device or stab a man in the heart.
The head also carries the infrared sensors that aren’t its only eyes. In the center of its body it has a 360-degree pan-tilt-zoom camera used to support environmental pathfinding, object manipulation and image capture.
All vision is streamed to a cloud-based AI which manages target identification, macro navigation, systems and power management. In addition to the compact and quiet power source, it is the cloud-based AI that makes the LS3 system so capable. The LS3 is linked to a quantum computing platform able to take in the inputs from its sensors, marry them to its handler's commands, and carry them out with an accuracy a real dog would have trouble matching.
Which is also its primary weakness, because if it loses its link to the AI in the sky, an LS3 becomes nothing more than a handy packhorse, falling back on basic programming to follow its handler around like a small mule.
You could get it to carry your junk for you, but it couldn’t do anything except follow you around until you managed to get an uplink again.
Prototypes are already in testing today (see image attached, of an airbase security test conducted by the US Air Force recently). Will the LS3 be as capable as described above, within the timeframe in which KOBANI is set, ie the year 2030? Well, think about this - in 2010 the fastest version of the Porsche 911 could do zero to 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds. Today, a standard production line Tesla Model S can do zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds.
So, I think the answer to that question is 'YES'.
This is the Future of War