OPINION:
Russia and China are actively developing autonomous machines that can operate independently on the battlefield, carrying out combat tasks. Russia armament companies are especially far along in developing the technology to allow robots, or artificial intelligence, to lead other robots into battle. The Pentagon is especially interested in their progress.
RT reports on Russia’s Unicum software system, heralded as similar to Synet in “The Terminator,” which can perform complicated military tasks on its own. “Powering a group of up to 10 robotic complexes, the Unicum artificial intelligence (AI) communicates and distributes ’roles’ among the robots, chooses the ’commander’ of the robotic task force and assigns combat mission to each individual machine. It can locate targets, choose dominating positions on a battlefield, request target elimination validation from human operators and eliminate the targets. It is also capable of automatically requesting replacements for disabled machines.”
This past summer, Russia unveiled its Platform-M, in Sevastopol. The unit is an autonomous weapons platform that can operate ten miles from its base and can be used in reconnaissance, security, or patrol missions day or night, and is armed with 7.62 machine gun and grenade launchers.
The Russian news agency TASS reports, “At present, the firm Sistemprom [the platform developer] is developing a unique automated combat module with large-caliber machine-guns and the grenade launcher compartment and is designing the strike and reconnaissance modules with the use of aircraft,” said a Russian defense official. Tasks for the combat robots will include radiation and chemical reconnaissance, patrol and mine clearing missions, and targeted strikes. The robots will be deployed “where there is danger to a person’s life.”
The Russian defense ministry has set a goal for 30 percent of Russian military hardware to be robotic by the year 2025.
“We know that China is already investing heavily in robotics and autonomy and the Russian Chief of General Staff [Valery Vasilevich] Gerasimov recently said that the Russian military is preparing to fight on a roboticized battlefield and he said, and I quote, ’In the near future, it is possible that a complete roboticized unit will be created capable of independently conducting military operations,’” War is Boring quotes deputy defense secretary Robert Work.
“I will make a hypothesis: that authoritarian regimes who believe people are weaknesses … that they can not be trusted, they will naturally gravitate toward totally automated solutions. Why do I know that? Because that is exactly the way the Soviets conceived of their reconnaissance strike complex. It was going to be completely automated. We believe that the advantage we have as we start this competition is our people,” he said.
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