The battlefield today is VERY dangerous to infantry & armor.
It seems we have returned the days of trench warfare where tens of thousands of men died or were wounded attacking machine guns in a single battle.
Due to world demographics there is a difficulty supplying adequate numbers of soldiers.
Perhaps the first robots will not be deployed in factories but on the battlefield. Terminators.
U.S. and Ukrainian Forces Went Head-to-Head in an Exercise. Ukraine’s Drones Won.
Battlefield drill shows Pentagon hasn’t fully absorbed lessons of Russia’s war
It seems the US military is behind in the learning curve.
U.S. Army troops faced off against Ukrainian drone operators at a military exercise in Germany earlier this year. It didn’t go well for the Americans.
During the exercise, called Combined Resolve, Ukrainian drone units easily spotted and defeated U.S. troops and armored vehicles on rotation from Fort Hood in Texas, according to people familiar with the events.
in the Middle East this year, the U.S. has struggled to defend against Iran’s long-range drones, which have killed and injured soldiers and destroyed aircraft.
A critical difference between the US war on Iran and previous US and allied bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Gaza, is that the US and Israel have failed to destroy Iran’s air defense system and cannot fly warplanes over Iran without risking the loss of planes and pilots to enemy fire. Iran has wisely built its critical defense infrastructure underground, with arms factories, weapons stockpiles and launch sites sheltered safely beneath its impenetrable mountainous terrain.
Even though US warplanes avoid entering Iranian airspace, the Congressional Research Service has reported that the US has lost at least four F-15 fighters, an F-35, an A-10, seven KC-135 refueling planes, an E-6 AWACS plane, two MC-130J special operations aircraft, a helicopter, a high-altitude Triton drone and 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones.
By contrast, during the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces lost only one A-10 and six helicopters, after systematically destroying much of Iraq’s air defenses through a low-intensity bombing campaign conducted under cover of the so-called no-fly zones, which the US, UK and France unilaterally imposed after the First Gulf War in 1991.
The Russians have demonstrated in Ukraine that the capacity to quickly ramp up production of relatively inexpensive artillery shells and drones can be more critical in a war than spending trillions on big-ticket weapons programs.
US Defense Industry:“Bah, there no money to be made there!”
I am not a big believer in anthropomorphic robots in factories but I am even less of a believer of them on the battlefield. When it comes to ground mobility, tracked vehicles will remain king for the foreseeable future.
I anticipate we may eventually have tracked drones - but aerial drones (that have the ability to fire the same armaments of terrestrial vehicles) are likely to rule automated warfare for a long time.
Rather than trench warfare netting seems to be the best defense against drones for now. Works against cheap light weight drones. Heavy drones can probably penetrate but they are not cheap and probably not expendable. Still vulnerable to rockets and artillery when spotted by drones.
Robots on the battlefield that can identify a target and engage or destroy it may be in our future, but many fear the consequences. All of those self driving auto crashes remind us technology is good but not perfect.
NATO plans to fortify its eastern edge using drones, sensors and artificial intelligence in a massive network designed to spot and help repel a potential Russian attack.
Western officials say the alliance is exploring AI-assisted drone operations as part of the broad effort to bolster its defenses. The aim, however, isn’t full autonomy; instead, machines could help to pilot the drones while human operators make the call on what they strike.