A few days ago, there was a quite sci-fi scene on the battlefield between Russia and Ukraine, saying that on a battlefield near Avdeyevka, an important town in eastern Ukraine, two unmanned combat vehicles of the Russian army were blown up by suicide drones of the Ukrainian army, and the scene was in flames, but there were no casualties. The Ukrainian army's use of drones, after two years of war, has indeed made great progress, in contrast, the Russian army's unmanned combat vehicles still only appear occasionally, and they are at an absolute disadvantage in terms of battlefield concealment and driving speed, and it is natural to be strangled by drones.
UAVs hit unmanned combat vehicles
If, in the future, what appears on the ground battlefield is not a slow-moving unmanned combat vehicle, but a robot advance team, how should the defenders deal with it? The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is an institution specializing in advanced defense science and technology research and development. They are implementing a plan to evaluate the effectiveness of existing unmanned weapons and equipment, such as drones, unmanned combat vehicles, and infantry support robots, so that they can be used on a large scale in frontline operations one day.
Regarding the large-scale manipulation of unmanned weapons, only UAV swarm technology can be actually implemented now, and in this regard, our country has begun actual combat drills and has achieved certain results. According to a report by CCTV News in August last year, UAV swarms with "intelligent networking thinking" can adapt to different battlefield environments according to different operational needs, carry different types and quantities of weapons and equipment, and launch all-round strikes against enemy targets. However, compared with the drone swarm, the technical difficulty of realizing the robot to form an advance team is much higher.
The new tactics of Chinese drone swarming are attracting the world's attention in their unique way
First of all, the environment of the ground battlefield is more complex than that in the air, and robots that do not have peripheral vision cannot use the simplest movements like human soldiers to see and hear all directions. Secondly, at this stage, robots still have quite a lot of defects in terms of travel speed, autonomous navigation, and target recognition, and it is very difficult for them to make the same tactical actions as human soldiers under manned or even unmanned control.
However, the U.S. Army is still ready to eat this first bite of crab, and they have proposed the concept of "manned and unmanned combat", the core idea is to send robots into the battlefield first, collect real-time intelligence, and clear as many obstacles as possible, so that when human troops attack, they can greatly reduce casualties. For the Pentagon, the current Russian-Ukrainian front line is an excellent weapons testing ground, and both sides have invested a lot of resources in the development of unmanned equipment.
American SPUR robot dog
In this unmanned weapons showdown, no matter whether the Russian army's unmanned combat vehicle wants to lay mines, clear mines, or launch an attack, at least it has been discovered for the follow-up human troops, and it is being stared at by the Ukrainian army's drones, so if the Russian army's unmanned combat vehicles can run faster and have stronger concealment, whether they can evade the detection of the Ukrainian army and complete the task, this is a subject that all military powers, including the United States, will carefully study.
Of course, that's not to say that in a few years' time, we'll see the Terminator vs. Gundam, a technology that is still in its infancy and facing considerable controversy. For example, after robots have weapons, how can they prevent them from pulling the trigger at the "wrong time"? There is also the "fault tolerance rate" that was exposed a few days ago that the Israeli army uses AI algorithms to target Hamas members and set a "tolerance rate" that can kill 15 to 20 civilians for every Hamas member killed.
"Artificial intelligence" is disrupting the modern form of warfare
But in any case, as countries increase investment in the research and development of unmanned weapons and artificial intelligence, this will inevitably set off a new round of arms race, and profoundly affect the future form of warfare.