One military expert calls weaponized robots “the future of warfare.” Illustration by Tomer Hanuka

At the age of seventy-four, Jerry Baber has winnowed his primary interests in life to four subjects: shotguns, robots, women, and cars. When Baber is holding forth—his default mode of communication being the filibuster—his conversation tends to fall somewhere among these categories. Often his passions intersect, as in the question of whether or not a Corvette is an ideal car for picking up women. (It is.) Similarly, Baber might be discussing his love of robots and shotguns, and whether, by combining the two, he is helping to shape the future of warfare from his garage. (He is.)

Baber, an engineer by training, is an expert in investment casting—a method for making small pieces of finely shaped metal. He lives down the road from the Bristol Motor Speedway, in Piney Flats, Tennessee, a hilly town dotted with cattle farms, just south of the Virginia border. There he operates a small foundry, where he manufactures gun parts. Over the years, he has contributed triggers, barrels, hammers, and other components for half a million firearms. “I probably know as much, or more, as any one single person about manufacturing guns,” he told me one afternoon, while driving through the Appalachian foothills in his cherry-red Chevy Impala. (“The best buy on the road today, barring none.”)

Until recently, Baber’s reputation as a firearms craftsman was known only to a few dozen gun-trade insiders. Then, a few years ago, he started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12. The AA-12 has the power of a twelve-gauge shotgun but none of its bruising recoil. Recoil is a problem with any shotgun; a typical single-shot twelve-gauge will, as Baber puts it, “just rattle your damn teeth when it goes off.” A gun’s kick occurs when gas from ignited gunpowder propels the shell out of a gun barrel, creating an equal and opposite force that pushes the gun’s firing bolt backward. That force eventually gets transferred to the shooter’s shoulder, and the pop of the recoil also sends the barrel upward. Trying to fire an automatic version of a twelve-gauge shotgun would be like holding a fire hose with one hand.

By contrast, you can fire an AA-12—which shoots five shotgun shells per second—with one hand and hold a mug of coffee in the other without spilling it. Made almost entirely of aircraft-grade stainless steel, the gun can fire thousands of rounds without cleaning. Baber spent a dozen years, and upward of a million and a half dollars of his own money, perfecting the gun. He believes that the AA-12 is the most deadly close-range weapon ever created.

Not long ago, Baber decided that his gun was so reliable and accurate that it could be mounted with confidence on unmanned vehicles. Armed robots, he believes, could offer crucial assistance in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; they could be employed on a street monitored by snipers or sent into a building harboring insurgents. Last year, Baber met with engineers at Robotex—a start-up in California that makes ground-based robots—and at Neural Robotics, a company outside Nashville that manufactures unmanned helicopters. Together, they created prototypes of small, remote-controlled armed machines. Baber keeps several in his workshop, and talks about them as if they were pets.

Like most people who travel to Piney Flats to meet Baber, I had first learned about him through online video clips illustrating the destructive potential of his creations. The most popular videos involve Baber and others shooting the AA-12 at targets in Baber’s back yard. In one clip—viewed two million times on YouTube—a dainty, short-haired woman in high heels casually grips the gun and fires off eight hundred balls of .20-calibre metal in four seconds, before turning to smile at the camera. In another, Baber uses a remote control to maneuver a ground robot around a room. The video cuts to a tiny white helicopter, whose cockpit could barely accommodate a toddler, at rest on the grass. The blades whir, and the aircraft rises in a strong wind; suddenly, it unloads twin AA-12s into a distant wooden target.

Baber keeps several workshops in Piney Flats, on a wide, grassy piece of property straddling a hilltop road. His foundry occupies the back of an eleven-thousand-square-foot single-story warehouse with a pine-log exterior. A lifelong bachelor, he lives in an apartment at the front of the building; in the middle of the complex is a large indoor pool.

Baber has an elliptical paunch, a white walrus mustache, and long sideburns that, along with the red-tinted glasses he sometimes wears, suggest a seventies country-music singer. He likes his jeans loose enough to require an occasional hitch, and denim button-downs with the pocket flaps splayed open. His voice has a friendly, nasal twang that renders “where” as “whur.”

When I visited, a seven-foot-long white helicopter, like the one in the video, sat on a folding table; Baber introduced it as Junior. He didn’t have names for two robots that were on the floor. The larger of them, the size of a Radio Flyer wagon, had caterpillar treads, like a miniature tank. An AA-12, whose cylindrical magazine gave it the look of the tommy guns favored by Prohibition-era gangsters, had been affixed to a small turret. The smaller robot had wheels, and its turret gripped a semi-automatic version of an M-16 rifle, which Baber had re-engineered so that it, too, fired without recoil.

We sat in a pair of office chairs, and Baber grabbed a radio-signal remote control. He switched on the larger robot, directing it across the concrete floor until the treads bumped against my foot. On an LCD display behind Baber, I could see an image of my leg, transmitted by a camera under the robot’s gun barrel. The gun then pointed at my stomach. He assured me that it was not loaded.

We were interrupted by the arrival of Cory Olson, a salesman from Alabama who, like me, had come to see the robots and guns at first hand. A retired Army officer, Olson works for Pelican, which manufactures the high-impact plastic cases Baber uses to store his robots. Pelican’s board of directors is chaired by General (Ret.) Peter Pace, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Baber was hoping to lure Pace out to Piney Flats to see the robots, and he launched into a rapid-fire soliloquy about the capabilities of his “family.” The AA-12, unlike most military weapons, could shoot a variety of ammunition, including nonlethal pellets (“You can just machine-gun a whole crowd with it, if you want to,” he said reflectively) and a specially designed mini-grenade. He’d tested the mini-grenade by shooting it into a car windshield: “They blow out both side windows, take the rear window out, and just shred the car.” The ground robots’ treads enabled them to climb stairs, and a remote operator could use a zoom lens on the robots’ cameras to hold a target at several hundred yards. Such robots could, for example, roll out and defend a soldier wounded in a firefight. A larger ground robot, meanwhile, could be outfitted to carry six smaller ones—“so when it blasts its way in, now you’ve got seven robots in that building.”