British Army robots may be fighting the country’s enemy on battlefields by 2030, according to senior military official Gen Collins.
Writing in the British Army Review, the senior officer said that within seven years the first contact with a potential enemy on the battlefield should be made by a robot.
His statement echoes the words of UK Defence Minister, Gen Sir Nick Carter he said during interview in 2020 on the morning of Remembrance Sunday.
‘Thirty thousand “robot soldiers” could form an integral part of the British army in the 2030s, working alongside humans in and around the frontline,’ the head of the armed forces said in a television interview.
‘I mean, I suspect we could have an army of 120,000, of which 30,000 might be robots, who knows?’ Carter said back then, although he stressed he was not setting any particular target in terms of future numbers.
At the moment most drones and unmanned ground and sea vehicles require some human input. But that situation is likely to change and the conflict in Ukraine will increase the pace of the science around fully autonomy.
In Ukraine, the Russian Army has allegedly deployed artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled strike drones, such as the Kalashnikov ZALA and the Lancet.
Both have some autonomous capability, such as being able to independently find and destroy a target.
Equally worrying, a 2020 United Nations report stated that the Turkish-made Kargu-2 attack drone had been used for the first time in combat during a battle between warring parties in war-torn Libya.
According to its manufacturer, the Kargu 2 can be operated both autonomously and manually and that purports to use ‘machine learning’ and ‘real-time image processing’ against its target.
In 2021, Israel launched an AI-guided drone swarm to carry out attacks on Hamas militants in what was believed to be a world-first use of the technology.
An Israeli Defence Force (IDF) support unit deployed the swarm to locate and target Hamas militants who had allegedly fired rockets into Israel.
In the words of NATO: ‘This is not science fiction – the technology is largely developed though to our knowledge, no approved autonomous drone systems are yet operational.
‘The limiting factor is not the technology but rather the political will to develop or admit to having such politically sensitive technology, which would allow lethal machines to operate without being under the direct control of humans.’
