Why have a robot war at all?

[Thaluikhain]

Or if you just want to kill everyone, you can just bomb places to bit, which you have been able to do since mid WW2, and got a lot better by the very end. Don't need robots for that.

Just digging in is a pretty effective defense against bombing.

Like the allies bombed Berlin pretty damn hard but it took the russians waltzing into the city for the germans in the bunkers to finally surrender.

Later on the capital of North Korea got literally razed to the ground by bombers, but still kept working because they had moved their important stuff under the ground.

And then of course there's Vietnam where absolute air superiority and trying to barbecue all the locals still failed.

Ah, but they didn't try barbecue all the locals. They tried killing certain of them, while leaving certain others alive and keep the country and government intact(sh).

If the objective was just to kill as many people as possible, they could have done a good job at that without killbots.

[OgreBattle]

Japan surrendered with the starvation blockade, fire and nuke bombings though.

Chinese Civil War also ended with sieges of mass starvation and cities surrendering afterwards. Boots on the ground were kinda involved but it was largely cutting off supplies that mattered.

...ok occupation was also important. Boots on the ground are for normalizing relations rather than killing though.