BAGHDAD, Iraq — Navy technician Michael Kapeluck rips into the injured soldier on the table with a wrench and a hammer. Not your standard operating tools. But not your standard soldier either. At least, not yet.

Kapeluck and a half dozen other specialists work in the U.S. military's first deployed operating room for robots. He was sent to Iraq because he worked on robots at his base in San Diego, but "they won't have damage like this," he says, holding up a shrapnel-punctured tube, once an arm.

The Iraq war, where roadside bombs and car bombs have killed hundreds of U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, has made robots a regular part of the U.S. military formation. About 300 are assigned to the teams that disarm or destroy bombs that are found before they explode.

Whenever they can, teams send out a robot instead of a human when a roadside or car bomb is discovered before it has detonated.

Sometimes, using the robot's arm by remote control, they can disarm it. Other times, they send the robot out with a small explosive to safely destroy the bomb. Occasionally, the bomb explodes anyway.

"Each time one of these gets blown up, it has saved the life of an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) technician," says Sgt. Randy Davis, 21, of the Army's 52nd Ordnance Group.

That's already happened to two of his three-member team's robots in just two months in Baghdad.

The bomb squad robots here don't look much like R2D2. But there's a little resemblance to Johnny 5, a robot in the late 1980s movies "Short Circuit" and "Short Circuit 2" that developed lifelike intellect after being struck by lightning. Troops call their robots Johnny 5 if they're dependable.

Kapeluck is working on a Talon, the most common of the three models assigned to the military's explosive ordnance disposal teams.

All three are variations of robots sometimes used by police department bomb squads in the U.S. The big difference here is that they're used continuously, in an environment of grinding sand and extreme heat. Sometimes they get blown up.

"I've had (bomb disposal) units use the same robot for months," says Greg Thompson, 44, a contractor from Las Vegas. "Other times, they blew it up that (first) night. And all they brought back was a couple of tracks — that's all they could find," he said.

At up to $150,000 per robot system, the team tries to save all the parts it can.

With any of the models, a skilled operator, at a safe distance of up to 300 yards, can use a control grip to disable a crude bomb or place a disabling explosive, Thompson said.

The military plans to expand the use of robots beyond disarming bombs, increasing the number of robots on duty in Iraq to 1,000. The next batch will include small units that soldiers can send ahead to look for enemy ambushes or booby traps. These "scout bots" are small enough to be thrown over a wall or into a window and to fit inside a backpack.

The robot programs are part of the $1 billion overseen by the Pentagon's Defeat IED Task Force. IED refers to improvised explosive devices, the homemade bombs that have been one of the insurgency's most effective weapons.