Sounds like a great way for wealthy first world nations to maintain their positions of power. :/

I was speaking to my BIL who recently got out of the Marines and was in their MARSOC Program. He was telling me that, for the most part, the primary job of special forces isn't so much to fight, but to train locals to fight for us. Actual engagements by our military is really a last resort. We really only do proxy battles now.

So the example he gave me was our "Murder Van" program in Afghanistan and somewhere in Africa. As described, both these places are run by local "Warlords" that are really just well armed gangs. So what we do is find the rival gang, and our Spec Forces dudes train them and arm them. In the example he gave, there was an outpost with about 50 well armed bad guys and an "officer" that needed to get got.

So instead of the typical onesy-twosy guerilla tactics the rival gang used. MARSOC came up with a plan and trained a group of about dozen rival gang members. First, MARSOC folks helped them procure a transport van (cant remember if it was stolen or purchased). They mounted a Machine Gun inside the van and armoured it. Then, they stick a few gang members in the van - all armed to the teeth with US equipment, and position the rest around the outpost. Long story short, the van pulls up to the gate, draws bad guys in, then starts blasting with the MG. Meanwhile, we launch long-range artillery and send in a fleet of drones to hit our targets and provide additional support when opportune. The other dozen go in and clean up, all the while getting fed info from our ground and satelite intel. The rival gang gets to keep the weapons and what is left with the outpost.

So this is the current iteration of our "Proxy War" approach. But you can see how adding more robots to this will make it even more effective.

Also, when talking to him about robots and stuff, he mentioned that the thing he sees as hugely valuable are "sherpa" bots. The whole murder van approach is predicated on surprise. So that means small teams who then have to bring in a crap load of equipment. So instead of having a dozen Marines each carring a 100+ pounds go gear, you could potentially have just 3 or 4 with a robo mule carrying the equipment. It opens up all sorts of logistical options.