The US army dreams of armies of robots piloted by a handful of humans

The Pentagon wants robots that are more autonomous, more intelligent and above all much less dependent on humans. The idea is no longer just to produce more military drones, but to allow a few operators to supervise entire fleets of machines capable of collaborating with each other. Welcome to modern warfare.

The drone doesn’t do everything

To achieve this, the American army is banking in particular on two new projects from DARPA, the advanced research agency of the Department of Defense. The first has a very DARPA-compatible name: “Materials for Physical Compute in Untethered Robotics”. Its objective? Create robots that can think more for themselves, without spending their time chatting with remote servers. The second program, “Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence” – or DICE, because it always needs an acronym – should allow machines to form teams autonomously to accomplish complex missions.

These projects could feed into the work of the office responsible for autonomous warfare at the Pentagon. And obviously, Washington does not intend to do things by halves: the budget of this structure would increase from 226 million dollars this year to 54 billion in the 2027 budget proposal.

This all sounds like a science fiction army. In practice, however, some former military officials point out that the problem does not come down to buying more drones. In a column published by The Hillformer general David Petraeus and researcher Isaac Flanagan believe that the American army has already experienced this type of situation in the Middle East. At the time, the United States had numerous Predator drones… but their operation required an enormous amount of personnel.

According to them, a single Predator patrol required nearly 150 people. Not just pilots, but also analysts, technicians, operators and the entire organization that goes with it. Â Accumulating drones without completely reviewing their mode of use risks producing Excel tables filled with equipment that is impossible to use effectively.

To avoid a human operator having to manage each drone individually, DARPA is working on several avenues at the same time: making the robots more autonomous so that they depend less on remote data centers, allowing them to communicate directly with each other to form groups capable of organizing themselves, and developing commands in natural language to simplify their piloting. The goal is to reduce personnel requirements while speeding up decision-making on the ground, while the US military is still figuring out how to effectively integrate these technologies into its troops.

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