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Weaponology
2007 · TV series · documentary · 43 min episodes · 2 seasons
Weaponology is a documentary television series that premiered on November 6, 2007 on the Discovery Channel. The program also airs on the Military Channel.
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Some of the comments here remind me that not everyone watches occasional episodes of 'Weaponology' [1] :-) That show does a credible job of tracking the various technologies that contribute to the eventual weapon that you know today in the 21st century. One of the shows talked about the Tank and how it was developed to get people across the 'deadmans zone' in trench warfare and ended up becoming the backbone of mobile maneuver tactics.
So this thing demonstrates a vehicle that can navigate completely unimproved terrain carrying a useful load. In battlefields like Afghanistan there is a huge challenge getting troops resupplied (this is true in any war of course). Helicopters and other air drop means (the robotic parachutes are pretty cool) require that your troops break cover to recover their goods, these things could walk into camp where you are under cover drop off supplies.
So one tactician might air drop these things out of a plane at a safe altitude and have them land within a couple of miles of the targeted base. The vehicle starts up, and walks over to the base to drop off the supplies. It could conceivably walk back out and, using a helium balloon, send up a retrieval cable that would let a helicopter come and pull it out of there.
Thats a pretty cool capability. And in peace time if this thing could walk into a city ravaged by an earth quake and drop off supplies, that would be cool. Or carry a clean up device through a nuclear contaminated forest, etc etc. The key is 'unimproved terrain' and '400 lbs for 20 miles'.
[1] http://military.discovery.com/convergence/weaponology/episode/episode.html