The Army is wholeheartedly embracing the idea that artificial intelligence will play a role on the battlefield—but don’t expect robots to replace soldiers everywhere.
What service leaders would like is to send a robot out to clear a building or lay a line charge to detonate an obstacle, Gen. James Rainey, head of Army Futures Command, told an audience Tuesday at the McAleese defense conference outside Washington.
“The real art of the deal is going to be: how do you figure out how to integrate them into formations in a way that optimizes the advantages? I’m talking about no blood through first contact,” Rainey said.
And that’s a priority for the Army as it looks to redesign its warfighting doctrine in the wake of the Global War on Terror to be better prepared to fight a peer adversary on the ground, air, and in cyberspace while keeping its equipment and people safe and powered.
“The proper combination of humans and machines” could help some of the Army’s heavy units drop weight to make them more maneuverable on a battlefield and also easier to sustain over long periods, while giving soldiers the space to solve problems and make “values-based” decisions, Rainey said.
Drones have done that in air warfare over the past 20 years, he said, freeing up humans from needing to scout out enemy positions and pilot aircraft to drop large, precise weapons on them. Now the Army is looking for the thing that will lighten the load for ground combat.
Whatever that is, it will either need to be “expensive and exquisite” or “cheap and mass,” Rainey said. That means it better do the job perfectly while being proverbially bomb-proof. Otherwise, it should be inexpensive and easy to buy in bulk.
Those two buckets represent the top and bottom 10 percent of systems the Army needs, he said, “and we’re trying to avoid spending most of our money on the 80 percent in between, that are neither explicit nor cheap, right?”
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