https://www.army-technology.com/features/feature77200/
"[...] every 55,702 barrels of fuel burned in Afghanistan by the US military forces corresponded to one casualty."
So... that would make them exactly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If that were the case we wouldn't have to imagine, we'd have the results in the field already.
So that war must be of a different kind. Not the kind where you already have technical superiority and have 0 incentive to develop it because you can already make truckloads of money by supplying current generation equipment to the front lines. It has to be a war where developing the new tech is the difference between your country existing or not a decade or more from now.
That's a special kind of war. It could be a cold war but it's unlikely to have one of those in the same way the one from the 20th century unfolded. And if that kind of "hot" war is the only one that can bring these improvements I'd rather stick to driving my own car and labeling my own photo library :).
Someone I know frequently relays an anecdote. They were designing a new military helicopter. One of the requirements was that if the pilot was injured the aircraft should be able to return to base and come to a hover. They were trying to figure out how to cut weight. My friend said, well, if we just remove the pilot and all the equipment needed to support them, we'll lose a lot of weight, and the vehicle will be more aerodynamic. His suggestion wasn't taken seriously. That was before Iraq/Afghanistan.
That project got canceled, my friend retired. I have another friend working at the same company. They are building an autonomous helicopter.
*Edit: ok looks like someone else already noticed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600849
Something like a WW or a cold war where you question whether your city will be the next Hiroshima brings you a jump: the nuclear bomb, the ICBM, man in space and on the Moon, and so many other Sci-Fi tech. That's what I meant.
Yes, today we have slightly better autonomous vehicles than a decade ago but this is natural evolution and it relied on progress in so many other (not necessarily war driven) improvements: computers, electronics, etc.
I would rather not see the war that brings you the AI for autonomous machines.
I think he's envisaging a big peer war with mass mobilization ala WW1/WW2, but he imagines such a war would be like a big Iraq/Afghanistan. It wouldn't.
One observation about the Syrian Civil War (and Iraq and Afghanistan) is that large areas of the country became extremely dangerous, because everyone was fighting over them and you often couldn't see the adversary or know who you were fighting. Another is that supply lines were quite vulnerable; forces could hole up in a military base and be relatively safe, but to continue operations in the field, they needed food/ammo/fuel, all of which needed to be transported at significant risk. A third was that whichever force brought security to a region and stopped the fighting there often won political power, because a majority of people don't care who rules them, they just want to not die.
Drones + self-driving supply lines would allow a belligerent to fortify & disperse their own industrial and operations base, well out of contested zones, and then project power at zero risk to their own lives into disputed areas. If the drones are smart enough (i.e. minimize civilian casualties but can easily detect and eliminate belligerents), they're also likely to win political points for eliminating combatants.
In any case, this is unlikely to spell victory for the belligerent who chooses this route. Humans are cheaper than self driving military trucks. You can afford to lose them. Literally-literally.
It's only in our cushy relative world peace situation we find ourselves entertaining the idea of spending a million dollars on a truck is somehow cheaper than losing a ten thousand dollar truck with 6 men on it.
And no, humans are not cheaper than self-driving trucks. They appear so at the beginning of a conflict because wars usually start when there's an excess of humans and a shortage of resources for them all. However, it takes 18 years to grow a human to the point where they can fight in a war, and another year or two to train them. It takes 2-3 years to tool up a factory to produce drones & self-driving trucks (and maybe a decade to get the software right), but once you do, you can produce one every couple days. Assuming you can maintain your industrial & technological base long enough to get that factory up, guess which one is going to win?
The limiting factor for the Japanese in WW2 wasn't planes, it was trained pilots - they had no problem crashing the planes into ships with untrained pilots because those were both abundant resources, but were incapable of fighting a sustainable air war.