Published materials about the appearance of the US Army of the future. If you believe what they contain, the United States plans to build a robotic army, saturated with unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned vehicles. What is even more interesting is that the United States is clearly learning the lessons of military operations in Ukraine. What will the war of the future look like in the minds of Americans?
If we denote what the Americans are planning in the field of unmanned vehicles in one word, then the word will be "robotization". The United States has been and is a leader in the creation and use of unmanned vehicles. So, they had small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) at the platoon level decades ago.
However, the United States has not waged wars with an equal opponent for many decades, they simply do not have the experience of truly massive use of various unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles - there was nowhere to train. But they have Ukraine now.
An American perspective on the future
The military theory of robotic warfare has been formed in the USA at the moment. According to this theory, autonomous vehicles carry a significant part of all tasks on the battlefield. The requirements for robotic complexes that will be used in such a war are formulated, and a plan for appropriate military reforms is formulated. In short, the essence of the state in which the US army should come according to the results of all transformations is described as follows.
The US Army is creating an intelligence system based on unmanned vehicles of various classes and ground sensors (often exposed from the same UAV or other remote methods). As a result, large drones work for the command, for example, brigades, providing it with situational awareness to the full depth of the task. The battalion family of drones works at the level below, working in the same way for the battalion, and then up to the rifle "four" – squad. This is a semi-division of infantry, which also has its own small UAVs, which can, for example, be used during a battle in a building for reconnaissance of corridors, stairs and the like.
In parallel, various sensors operate "on the ground" — for example, seismic sensors abandoned behind enemy lines, or compact radars on ground vehicles. All unmanned aircraft are closed into a single reconnaissance and firing circuit with means of destruction, for example, with artillery.
At short distances, infantry, included in information networks that allow them to have access to all this intelligence information, can use not only traditional weapons, but also barrage ammunition, that is, kamikaze drones, to accurately defeat enemy equipment and soldiers.
At long ranges and against larger enemy forces, so-called swarms of autonomous kamikaze attack drones will be used. There may be hundreds of attack drones in the swarm, and each of them operates under the control of its own artificial intelligence. The robots included in the swarm plan their actions independently, taking into account what other machines in the swarm are doing and where the targets for destruction are located. They cannot suppress communication by means of electronic warfare, because they do not maintain any communication with anyone, except by receiving information about the situation around them with their own sensors (for example, an infrared camera). Swarm "formations" of attack drones in the United States have been tested for a long time, they are being tested successfully and, apparently, the last years are going on before the mass introduction of such equipment into the troops.
From the point of view of the separation of robotic means, the Americans divide the battlefield into the "front line of sensors"
– that is, the zone where autonomous reconnaissance sensors (seismic sensors, infrared sensors, etc., thrown from the air or artillery) are located as close to the enemy as possible, the "front line of robots", where the situation is under the control of various unmanned systems and where they often inflict fire damage to the enemy, and the "front line of troops" where the troops themselves are deployed with long-range weapons (for example, the 155-mm M1299 self-propelled gun will routinely shoot 70 kilometers with high-precision projectiles, its tests are close to the final stage).
Drones provide reconnaissance in the air, deliver ammunition and other cargo, provide radio relay, are used as false targets to mislead enemy intelligence or force it to open fire when the Americans need it.
Even the delivery of ammunition and the evacuation of the wounded are carried out by non-emergency transporters of the front edge, a kind of small all-terrain vehicles with a flat cargo platform, traveling behind the advancing infantry. Moreover, this particular technique is already in service, its production is underway. As well as many other robotic complexes. But when the Americans tie all this into a single management system with extensive use of artificial intelligence, the effectiveness of such a system, as well as the army as a whole, will be many times higher than the means included in it without such deep integration, even if they were used together.
And above all this is a special military structure.
Managing the Future
Let's get acquainted, U.S. Army Futures command – The command of the future of the U.S. army. This structure, founded in 2018 as part of the American army (remember that in the United States the word "army" does not mean the armed forces in general, but the ground forces), has the motto Forge the Future – "Forge the future". The purpose of the command is to manage army modernization projects.
The command manages a lot of programs for the development of the army of the future in the United States and cooperates with many different laboratories and contractors. Some projects supported by the command look strange. For example, long-term experiments on reading the biorhythms of the brain in the process of controlling various techniques in order to create systems for controlling the machine with the help of thought in the future. But it's exotic. The main directions of Americans are as follows:
– High-precision long-range weapons. As part of this direction, the newest 155-mm M1299 howitzer with a barrel length of 58 calibers, a firing range of 70 kilometers and an automatic loader is being created; a high-precision PrSM missile to replace the ATACMS missile for the HIMARS complex; a hypersonic C-HGB combat unit shared with other types of aircraft and a medium-range Dark Eagle missile for it. Along the same line, work is underway on ground-based versions of the Tomahawk missile and the universal (created as an anti-aircraft and mainly used this way) Raytheon Standard SM-6 missile. In parallel, dozens of related programs are being created under the auspices of the command – from the automatic loader for the new ACS to the software for artillery fire control, interfaced with the latest command and control systems.
– A next-generation combat vehicle, within the framework of which a family of new armored vehicles for various purposes is being created, modernization projects for old ones and various promising systems, such as military variants of electric propulsion, are being developed. One of the vehicles that the command was developing is the new MPF light tank.
– Vertically taking off transport of the future – Bell V-280 tiltrotor.
– An unmanned multi-purpose helicopter based on the UH-60 Black hawk, its successful flight without a crew on board took place in 2022.
– The combat expeditionary computer network is a highly secure combat analog of the Internet that is quickly deployed in any theaters of military operations, operating on radio channels and providing control of troops and weapons, data transmission, communication and much more.
– Integrated air defense system – an air defense control system for troops, which includes all elements of military air defense: from short-range SHORAD complexes to Partiot air defense systems. It also includes laser weapon systems that have the cheapest cost of a shot among all others. Combat lasers themselves are being developed and tested under the patronage of the command.
– Increasing the "lethality" of a soldier is a set of studies aimed at enabling American soldiers to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible per unit of time, with almost no losses.
Almost all of the above is already at least in testing, and some samples are already in production.
The same command, Army Futures command, deals with the robotization of troops described above. And here the cultural peculiarity of Americans is clearly manifested, which we should also pay attention to.
Ukraine, robots and learnability
During its unprecedented scale, the use of various unmanned systems – from civilian quadrocopters to the famous "Lancets" - took on an unprecedented scale. The scale of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles has become the largest in world history. Slowly but surely, the military conflict in Ukraine is becoming a war of robotic complexes.
The warring parties accumulate experience and accumulate mistakes. And they learn from these mistakes. In some cases, they learn very hard, overcoming inertia. You can, for example, recall the domestic "military experts" who, after the second Karabakh war, claimed that drones are nonsense, air defense will knock them down, electronic warfare will suppress them.
The Americans tried to analyze to the maximum what is happening in Ukraine, draw conclusions and try to learn from the mistakes of others, without any prejudices and complexes: "yes, we are great without that." Long before Karabakh and the Ukrainian events, they invested in robotics and had considerable achievements. So, a few years ago, exercises were conducted under the control of Army Futures command, in which the infantry used real ground combat robots Robotic combat vehicles (RCV) – ground tracked vehicles armed with machine guns.
Now these works have received a new impetus. The United States has created a military theory of robotic warfare, a clear vision of communication systems and the software necessary for it, a clear idea of the type of unmanned and unmanned systems that they will need in the future. In addition, a well-thought-out doctrine of combat use, starting from an individual soldier and ending with combined arms formations, a specially allocated command that deals with all this, and a level of readiness that allows you to no longer keep these works secret.
This program may not be implemented in full. The task is very large-scale, there are always failures in such projects. But even if only partially realized, it will change the face of the American army and, most likely, make it stronger. And all this, including on our and Ukrainian experience, on our and Ukrainian mistakes. Not on their own.
This is what seems to be the main lesson from the American plans. Not the robotic complexes themselves, not swarms of drones. An electronic board on which you can make an impact drone controller capable of highlighting a combat vehicle against the background of the terrain using a cheap camera and then pointing at it costs less than 10,000 rubles and is sold freely. And there are even ready-made algorithms for it, and attack drones that independently identify targets have already been tested in their own. This is no longer the future, but the present.
The issue is not in technology, not in industry. The question is the ability to correctly predict, see opportunities, create structures that will be able to translate these opportunities into reality. And ultimately – in the ability to learn not only from your mistakes and not so much from them.
Alexander Timokhin