I think the military drones are proof of the failure of AI research. Every single one of those devices lack AI, they must be controlled by a person. They are large remote control weapons, but not intelligent robots. The military funds plenty of research on AI but haven't actually fielded autonomous systems yet.
Many military robots are purely remote controlled, but many others integrate often substantial levels of autonomy. Most UAVs provide autonomous navigation and stationkeeping, for example, and often much more; other military robots operate with no human in the loop whatsoever (eg, AUVs).
It's also interesting to consider the autonomy of fast-react weapons-in-the-loop systems such as AA/SAM sites and ABM installations (eg, Patriot), and the contribution of that autonomy to associated friendly-fire incidents. Methods normally considered AI---probabilistic filters, reasoning, and data fusion, in particular---are fundamental to such systems.
Forgive me, I failed to make this clear, but I work on such systems and I don't think they are all that smart. The code for station keeping is less interesting than the code for directions on Google Maps. (Connecting GPS points in space is pretty damn easy). Landing a UAV is pretty sweet, but I still wouldn't call it AI. The complexity is on the control side, but if you call that AI then is your cruise control in your car AI?
I think that's very good that people still control the military drones. You don't want the drone dropping a bomb where it is not supposed to just because there was some suspicious movement there. No matter how well you can program the robot and how much elaborate heuristics you can give it, at this point it seems to me that humans are infinitely more flexible in making decisions. I wouldn't allow computers make life-and-death decisions any time soon.
