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Marines Seek To Outnumber Enemies With Robots
http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/marines-seek-to-outnumber-enemies-with-robots/
PENTAGON CITY: Since World War II, the US military has always expected to
fight outnumbered. Soon, however,
expendable unmanned systems may change that. For the first time in 70 years, America could have numbers on its side. That turns traditional assumptions about tactics, technology, and budgets upside down.
“It does flip things,” said
Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh, deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps. “We’ve been down the path of each system getting more expensive, more complicated, and therefore we’re buying less of them….What we see is the opportunity with unmanned systems to provide more mass.”
Mass, as a
principle of war, boils down to “quantity has a quality all its own.” The US has spent decades developing ever-smaller numbers of ever more expensive and “exquisite” weapons. Each fighter, helicopter, tank, or ship is vastly more capable than its predecessors, able to hit more targets over a wider area in a shorter period — but it still can only be in one place at a time, which limits your flexibility. Each high-end system can also be killed by one lucky shot, which limits your resilience against damage.
These factors may not have been crippling in counterinsurgency, but in an all-out war, there’ll be enough shots that some will get lucky. (It’s an old problem, as
Kipling wrote of British officers on the Indian frontier: “Two thousand pounds of education/Drops to a ten-rupee
jezail.”) And enough brute force can flatten finesse. At the receiving end of, say, a Russian cluster-munition barrage, expensive advanced technology blows up as easily as cheap stuff.
To reduce casualties in future landing operations, Walsh has already called for amphibious forces to have
robotic vanguards. “Instead of Marines being the first wave in, it’s unmanned robotics, whether it’s in the air or the surface or subsurface…sensing, locating, and maybe killing (targets),” he said this morning at the
AUVSI Unmanned Systems Defense conference. But today he also went into greater detail about a wider range of robotic applications that the Marine Corps’ considering.
In the air, a manned fighter like an
F-35B could launch aerial drones ahead of itself and then hang back as their digital “quarterback,” Walsh said, keeping the human pilot out of the worst danger zones while
extending his or her influence over much more space. You could even replace the manned mothership with an unmanned one and have a large, long-range drone disperse a swarm of smaller, short-range drones once it reached the target area.
On the ground, Walsh said, the Marines’
Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) troops — mounted in eight-wheel-drive armored cars called LAVs, akin to Army
Strykers — locate threats the way the horse cavalry once did, “by running into the enemy.” But if a recon patrol launched small drones to scout ahead, he said, “that is mass we wouldn’t be able to have if we were just moving vehicles.” The drones could detect enemy radio transmissions, triangulate their locations, and then attack by themselves or pass targeting data back to heavier weapons, Walsh said, all without a human Marine getting in harm’s way.
“We see that
swarm-type technology…being able to dominate the battlespace…at a lower cost,” Walsh said. “We find more mass, more affordable, because unmanned systems are going to be less expensive”:
“Swarms of low-cost uninhabited systems absolutely have to be part of the mix,” said
Paul Scharre of the
Center for a New American Security. “They won’t obviate the need for capital platforms to move Marines and equipment, but once in the fight, swarms have a number of advantages. They can complicate enemy targeting by presenting the enemy with a larger number of threats. They can overwhelm enemy defenses. They can disperse across a wide area, searching for threats and performing surveillance. They can act as expendable decoys, drawing fire away from higher-value manned assets.”
“The Marines have done some very innovative experiments,” Scharre said, “so it’s no surprise to hear this interest from Marine Corps leadership.”
In the near term, based on these experiments, the Marine Corps is buying enough quadcopter drones to equip four battalions of Marines, Walsh said. Equally significant, to help troops on the ground deal with all this data, the Marines are adding an additional Assistant Squad Leader to every squad. “We don’t want the commander, the squad leader in this case, heads down”
looking at a screen, Walsh said. You’ll still need
a few good men — but they’ll be helped along by a whole lot of cheap robots.