Let robots lead the way on the front lines, former Army leaders say

The U.S. Army wants robots to take the first hit in combat, but it’s moving too slowly to make them a mainstay of combat brigade formations, according to a new analysis.

Army commanders envision robots and unmanned vehicles scouting ahead of soldiers on a future battlefield where enemy drones and sensors are constantly hunting for targets.

But the service is moving toward that future at a fraction of the pace already seen in Ukraine, where ground robots are carrying out thousands of real-world missions each month, according to two former senior Army leaders.

“The Army does not need another series of short demonstrations that place a handful of autonomous systems in a formation and then remove them,” retired Col. Dave Rowland and retired Command Sgt. Maj. Brian Hester wrote Tuesday in an analysis published by West Point’s Modern War Institute.

While the Army is experimenting with small numbers of robotic vehicles for short periods, it needs to rapidly expand such operations so soldiers can figure out how to train and fight with them on a large scale, the authors said.

Ukraine’s military, the report notes, offers a real-world contrast.

Its forces conducted more than 100,000 logistics and casualty evacuation missions with unmanned ground vehicles during the first eight months of the year, according to Ukraine’s defense ministry. Monthly use climbed from 7,511 missions in January to nearly 20,000 in July.

The U.S. Army remains at a much smaller experimental scale at its training centers, according to the Modern War Institute report.

“A handful of autonomous systems can add capability to a formation,” the authors wrote. “Scale changes the equation.”

Getting there will require making autonomous systems part of ordinary brigade life rather than equipment that arrives for a demonstration and disappears afterward, Rowland and Hester wrote.

But there are practical problems. The Army must figure out how to operate large numbers of machines without assigning a soldier to control and maintain each one.

“Today, soldiers largely operate or supervise individual robotic systems,” the authors wrote. “That model will not scale.”

The goal is to move toward systems capable of performing missions with less human supervision, allowing one soldier to oversee multiple machines rather than requiring an operator for each vehicle, the report said.

To make that happen, the Army needs to begin reorganizing before autonomous technology is perfected, the report said.

There are parallels to World War I, when British troops initially struggled to understand how to use early tanks, Rowland and Hester said. Tactics and technology developed together as soldiers accumulated experience with the new weapon.

Autonomous systems require a similar approach, the report said.

“The question is no longer whether autonomous systems will join Army formations, but whether the Army will learn to fight with them at scale before the next war demands it.”