This fall, while politicians were rolling up their monogrammed sleeves to debate the troop surge, a thousand new fighters started shipping to Iraq right under their noses.

They were robots, mind you, not people. Such unmanned, unarmed droids had already been helping out in Iraq for a year, mostly looking for bombs. The next step was deploying the soldier-operated devices known as SWORDS: ground robots that look like toy tanks, if toy tanks had massive machine guns mounted on their roofs. Three of them are already packing heat in Iraq, with more to come—the Pentagon’s latest solution for reducing the numbers of U.S. casualties in wartime. Not considered? Less war.