I'm not surprised. Robots like QinetiQ's Talon and competing iRobot products have been deployed in the field for a decade doing things like recon and ordinance

I'm not surprised. Robots like QinetiQ's Talon and competing iRobot products have been deployed in the field for a decade doing things like recon and ordinance disposal. I'm not sure they're awesome pieces of engineering, but they're mature products that see real military use. There were even mounted weapon experiments with them around 2002. So seeing them armed on the battlefield is not a huge step. Atlas, on the other hand, looks like a pie-in-the-sky research project. It even has a cord attached to it. It's definitely not going to be on the battlefield shooting things in the next five years. Disclosure: I worked on the Talon robot (the one in the article's main picture) in college.