In 2003, members of the U.S. Congress and military hatched a plan, called Future Combat System, that would revolutionize the way the army waged war on the ground.
Part of the plan was to retool the military's ground fleet so that one third of its vehicles would be unmanned by 2015, but that timeline is now reportedly out of the question, so much so that the armed forces are even leaning on civilian technology to develop remote-controlled automobiles. A lack of funding and technological hiccups have, despite progress, put unmanned vehicles on something of a back burner.
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"Autonomous vehicles have come a very long way over the past decade, but the technology still has a long way to go before the U.S. Army and Marine Corps will find it ready for battle," Sam Brannen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Mashable in an email. "The money for this transition simply isn’t in the budgets, and there is more research and development and testing and evaluation to perform before these technologies are ready for the world’s best military."
Room for error in military operations is slim. Robots that can carry supplies across difficult terrain must not only be able to hold the supplies and walk in a fairly straight line, but must not get confused by dense forest or other obstacles. Robotic automobiles would have to drive on dangerous roads and would need to adjust to impediments along the way, and all these vehicles need to be protected from cyber attacks, because their software could be hacked. For now, there are too many uncertain variables for the technology to gain traction.
Brannen and Peter Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institute, told Mashable that military robots perform "dull, dirty or dangerous" tasks that soldiers either don't want to do or are deemed too risky, and autonomous vehicles would be used along the same lines.
Driverless caravans could transport supplies, especially in dangerous areas, to mitigate the risk of casualties. Improvised explosive devices, the unique bombs Taliban fighters bury along roads in Afghanistan, have killed 1,389 coalition troops in that country alone. That's half the total number of coalition fatalities from the war in Afghanistan. Alternatively, if a bomb explodes under an unmanned vehicle, no one dies.
"You may not want to get rid of humans altogether, but you can reduce the threat by reducing their number in convoys," Brannen said.
As the American military continues to fight wars with smaller groups of soldiers, such as the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden, troops may also use smaller autonomous robots to explore dangerous urban areas.
For now, though, the military's position is such that the civilian race to employ unmanned vehicles is beginning to outpace its own.
"We are developing robots that use dynamic controls and legs with the goal of making them able to work on a wide variety of terrains," a group of employees from Boston Dynamics, a civilian robotics company, told Mashable. "Such robots could be useful in places that are too dangerous for people to operate, such as disaster zones, emergency response situations, firefighting, combat and the like."
"Very soon, if the current trends hold, you will have soldiers familiar with driverless cars from companies that range from Google to Volkswagen that all want this out there in the early 2020s," Singer said. "So you'll have this tech proliferated on the civilian side," and not on the military side.
Yet Singer doesn't believe that trend will continue. Soldiers, he said, will see more robotics technology in their life outside the armed forces, which will start conversations that lead to a new push for more automation inside the military. In the meantime, Brannen thinks the armed forces will modify some civilian technology as needed, especially since the Budget Control Act of 2011 cut the military's budget through 2023, meaning they won't have as much money to spend on advancing their driverless ground fleet.
"There hasn't been the full proliferation yet," Singer said. "That doesn't mean it isn't coming."
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