From the Ukraine front: “I am absolutely convinced that robots and drones should be doing the fighting wherever possible. That is how we preserve the lives of our soldiers.”
Former Ukrainian defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has been on a media blitz lately trying to infuence the direction of travel for weapons producers and buyers toward low cost remote systems like those which Ukraine is currently using to hold back the much large Russian army. According to NYT, in his view, only armies equipped with cheap, smart and mass-produced weapons will survive in a new era of warfare.
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His views clash with establishment figures in the military and weapons industry, not least the (also) former commander of Ukraine's armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi, who was a firm believer in the need for increased mobilization to put more bodies on the front line. "Drones cannot hold territory, only human soldiers can."
But war, Federov said, was heading toward “the robotization of the front line” and remote piloting of drones that would remove soldiers from danger. A next stage would be autonomous systems attacking targets, evolving then into “autonomous drones fighting autonomous drones powered by artificial intelligence.”
Ukrainian drones now inflict about 95 percent of casualties on Russian soldiers along the front, according to Mr. Fedorov, far outperforming snipers, howitzers, tanks and all other conventional weapons combined. This is instructive, given the US Army is currently developing a 'new' Concept of Warfighting - called Combined Arms at Echelon - in which legacy artillery, mortars and expensive systems like HIMARS would still dominate.
155mm artillery shells are a staple of most NATO arsenals but no longer needed in Ukraine, Federov argued, now that the battlefield had transformed from two lines of trenches into something new. Analysts now describe the front as overlapping zones of denied access: a zone where either army can kill anyone, on foot or in a vehicle, with exploding drones.
This kill zone, as many soldiers call it, is wider than the 18-mile or so range of standard 155-millimeter shells and the effective range of tank cannons.
NYT reported Ukraine is still experimenting with new tools. On his phone, Mr. Fedorov showed a video of an improbable-looking, self-balancing robotic unicycle armed with a gun. In the video, the device bounced over potholes and an irrigation ditch at tremendous speed, like an evil Segway scooter.
Federov has a vested interest in promoting this narrative: he represents a Ukrainian defense industry built around remote and autonomous systems. If he moves to the private sector, Mr. Fedorov told NYT, he would choose a company working on a promising new military technology such as lasers, humanoid combat robots, dirt-cheap missiles or an A.I. weapon that was being tested in Ukraine.
That weapon, a drone that autonomously chooses targets with no radio connection to a pilot, has been tested in strikes in Russian-occupied Crimea, Federov said, but has not been mass produced.
Russia, the great adapter/adopter, has embraced cheap, mass produced missiles recently in a move away from expensive ballistics to the S8000 Banderol, a jet powered cruise missile with 150 mile range and 300lb warhead. The US is well behind the curve here with GBAM (Ground-Based Affordable Mass) still not fully funded: this is a joint Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and Army initiative targeting low-cost ($250,000 per unit or less), autonomous, ground-launched long-range strike weapons. The goal is to mass-produce standoff systems using commercial supply chains to preserve high-end munitions like Tomahawk and Precision Strike Missiles.
It should be said Federov's push for armed automatons is at odds with the Red Cross and other groups that support a human role in interpreting the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war that govern who can lawfully be killed in combat, and how.
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