What do you get if you combine an electronic Roomba vacuum cleaner with an X-Box video game? The next generation of military weaponry, operated by 20-something gamer/soldiers with big thumbs, lightning reflexes and a knack for remote-controlled combat.

It’s been a standing parental joke for decades: If only Junior could turn his skills at Halo 3 honed over hundreds of hours to good …. Well, now he can — in the Army.

According to NextGov, for the past year the U.S. Army has been testing robots, unmanned airplanes, sensors and other gear at the White Sands facility in New Mexico, and plans to deploy the high-tech weaponry to combat troops as early as 2011, when it’s likely we’ll still be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The high-tech systems the Army is testing and refining at White Sands Missile Range are both the remnants of its ambitious and now canceled $160 billion Future Combat Systems program and the core of a new battlefield modernization program the service plans to develop to replace it.

The Army intends to spin out systems developed for FCS as part of the brigade combat team modernization program headquartered at Fort Bliss, Texas, which adjoins White Sands, said Jerry Tyree, director of integration for the program. These include the tracked robot, an aerial robot, tactical and urban unmanned ground sensors, a missile system, and a battlefield network to link them all together.

The service plans to field these systems to seven infantry brigade combat teams between 2011 and 2014 at a cost of less than $2 billion, said Paul Mehney, an Army spokesman.

Of course, first the Army will have to figure out how to provide a battlefield broadband network to operate and coordinate the new systems. Today, communications-equipped Humvees can only deliver about 1.5 megabytes per second while the average speed of a residential broadband connection is 7 Mps.