Victor Pavlov showed off Ukraine’s newest and most versatile weapon: a battery-powered land robot.
The unmanned ground vehicles come in various shapes and sizes. One runs on caterpillar tracks and resembles a roofless milk float. Another has wheels and antennas. A third carries anti-tank mines. Since spring 2024 their use has grown exponentially.
“This is what modern warfare looks like. Armies everywhere will have to robotise,” said Pavlov, a lieutenant with Ukraine’s 3rd army corps.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is now in its fifth year and the conflict – Europe’s biggest since 1945 – has seen an astonishing transformation of battlefield weapons and tactics. The war has become a technological contest, fought not with expensive tanks but with cheap and expendable drones that can deliver bombs with deadly accuracy.
Ukraine’s drone expertise is now highly sought after amid the US-Israeli war against Iran. Last week Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed 10-year defence agreements with several Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to provide them with low-cost Ukrainian interceptors. They can shoot down long-range kamikaze Shahed drones, used by Tehran in its attacks on its neighbours, and by Moscow.
Anyone cheering this on is a bad person btw.
edit: 7 years ago it was uncontroversial to say robots should not be used to kill people. We are in the dumbest timeline. I actually do hope this spreads so the people downvoting my point understand how bad of an idea this is when their kids are determined to be valid combatants by automated weapon systems and are obliterated in order to win a war no one but the robots are still fighting.
It is a bad idea, but Pandora’s box cannot be closed. We must remember that developments within technological warfare has been the reason colonization and imperialism spread.
I hate the “good guy with a gun” position, but in regards to invading forces, it’s best to be prepared for what may come. Sun Tzu said “he who wants peace must prepare for war”.
What we’re seeing in the theater of war in Ukraine right now is how warfare will be waged currently as well as in the future and as such we want rather to lose robots than trained personnel, or even civilians.
The new war of attrition will be one of chips and metal. There’s nothing we can do about that really, except build defense systems, drones and robots made to counter or even cancel out invading drones and robots.
But make no mistake: Pandora’s box cannot be closed again. All the evils have been released - and you can’t shove them back in the box.
We’re not losing robots though. that’s the thing. This isn’t drone on drone warfare. This is drone on civilian and soldier warfare.
And that’s the exclusive future for this technology.
That’s what we decided was better than simply stopping all wars by enabling nuclear proliferation.
In my memory, which to be honest is quite limited, it was uncontroversial to say thay autonomous robots should not be used to kill people. Non-autonomous robots, such as Ukraine seems to be using, are essentially nothing more than an extension of modern arms, but one where the person ‘wielding’ the weapon is in a relatively safe place.
So you don’t remember the massive drone strike controversies or why the majority of the Iraqi and Afghanistan population will never, at any point in their lives, for the next several generations, be able to go outside without PTSD induced fear?
Or why drone operators commit suicide at significantly higher rates than other military vets?
These “robots” are actually ground drones, and the term “robot” is being widely misused.
They can’t identify the allegiance of a soldier. The operator will see, consider and then shoot. It’s better than going out there and getting shot at.
If you don’t know the state of the art, it’s easy to think they are robots, but they have the same autonomy level as an FPV drone. They are automated to the degree that you can tell them “drive 50 clicks north-east and stop”.
Really advanced versions will have a local algorithm to track and shoot an aerial target, once the operator decides that it’s a target. Because in air defense, latency means losing.
However, swarming weapons are a cause for concern in near future, because in those cases, one soldier may end up controlling 100+ weapons and likely won’t have a good overview of the situation.
It is the man not the machine. Humans design the robots. If the robots kill indiscriminately, that’s the fault of the designer. The article said that some of the robots do tasks besides killing such as clearing mines and bringing up supplies.
If you can’t understand that its because of the context, and that your brief initial comment is ignorant/simple, then it is probably not worth trying to persuade you towards any nuance involved here. Furthermore, no where is it mentioned that these weapons are autonomous; just robots/drones, giving a country under invasion a much needed advantage. Some of your comments seem to indicate a support of Russia, so again, likely spurious effort here.
There is no context that makes these weapons okay, and I have never supported Russia.
I get that reading is hard for liberals, which is why liberals exist in the first place, but do try a bit harder.
The big brained response is disappointing yet not surprising. No one said they’re ok, just that you made erroneous claims and are over simple. Ironic comment about dur reading is hard. Very low effort and trite.
“giving a country under invasion a much needed advantage”
So advantage is not ok? It’s not a positive thing? It’s not normalization of one of hte most environmentally and socially destructive technologies?
What is the alternative that you are ok with?
Diplomacy and asymmetric warfare. If you are actually being invaded and your response is to destroy your own environment while implementing weapons that indiscriminately kill, you don’t care about the people you’re protecting and you have no concern of the world after the war.
they don’t kill indiscriminately, just the enemy. what are you on about. and the environment angle really? next you will tell me russia is using only eco friendly bombs and drones. to be able to think about the world after the war you must have the world after the war. if you lose the war someone else will think about your world and i bet anything that they won’t be thinking about your precious environment. grow up
