Military AI Drones Could Take Over Future Warfare, Experts Warn

“At some point,” Samuel Bendett, Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for New American Security, tells Popular Mechanics, “military autonomy will become cost effective enough to be fielded in large numbers. At that point, it may be very difficult for humans to attempt to defend against such robotic systems attacking across multiple domains—land, air, sea, cyber, and information—prompting the defenders to utilize their own autonomy to make sense of the battlefield and make the right decision to use the right systems. Humans will still be essential, but some key battlefield functions may have to pass to non-human agents.”

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The March 2020 drone attack may well be a sign of things to come, Bendett explains, “In Russia, the military is on record going back almost a decade discussing mass-scale applications of robotic and autonomous systems to remove soldiers from dangerous combat and to overwhelm adversary defenses, making it easier to conduct follow-on strikes.”

Drone versus drone warfare, Bendett says, has already taken place. “In one key engagement in March 2024, Russian combat unmanned ground vehicles advanced on Ukrainian positions as part of an assault, only to be targeted and destroyed by Ukrainian first-person-view drones. In this engagement, both sides’ systems were controlled by human operators.”

The crucible of high intensity warfare in Ukraine is pushing a greater reliance on autonomous weapons. Ukraine’s army suffers from an acute manpower shortage and has leaned on drones whenever possible. “In Ukraine,” Bendett explains, “volunteers working on domestic drone development have said on multiple occasions that robots should fight first, followed by humans.

Read the full article and more on Popular Mechanics.