Unmanned & Autonomous System on the Modern Battle Field

How will unmanned and autonomous systems be received by military units and personnel on the battle field? A recent article published in the Journal of Security Studies explored this idea with the hopes of revealing how military personnel truly feel about placing their lives in the hands of an unmanned or autonomous weapons system. Can a soldier place the utmost confidence in the capabilities of an unmanned system in a high-risk life or death situation? This is the question this article questioned.

  While new technologies are not new to the military, a former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter stresses the importance of unmanned and autonomous systems in the military. Not only from a cost savings perspective but lifesaving perspective as well. Unmanned systems can remove soldiers from potentially dangerous situations on the battle field. The authors in the article systems understood the importance of unmanned system in the military but wanted to get a point of view from the soldiers who will actually have to put their trust in the technology that could one day potentially save their lives.

The authors conducted a survey of ground troop personnel and asked them if they preferred manned systems over unmanned or autonomous systems to back them up on the battle field. Personnel across all service had a strong preference for manned systems over unmanned or autonomous systems in combat situations. For the most part, there seems to be a lack of trust on the part of soldiers in their ability to have confidence in the technology of unmanned system especially on the battle field when their lives are at stake. This lack of trust extended to even less complex unmanned system technologies. Having been a soldier myself, trust is everything on the battle field. Without it, people can die! The authors of the article explored the possibility of instilling confidence in unmanned systems with a series of experiments to see if the willingness to trust in life or death situations was more or less powerful then mitigating risk. The results showed that soldiers preferred manned systems over unmanned systems. Soldiers had a strong preference to have manned systems in situations that involved high risk to soldiers on the ground as opposed to mitigating risk to air crews.

After reading the article and thinking about what system I would want to back me up in a life or death situation, I would have to go with the manned system. The battle field is a highly dynamic place with ever changing variables. I would have a lot more confidence in a manned system over an unmanned or autonomous system. Technology will have to advance more and prove its self before soldiers will fully have full confidence in unmanned and autonomous systems. One thing is for certain, unmanned system will have a integral part in military warfare.

References

MacDonald, J., & Schneider, J. (2019). Battlefield Responses to New Technologies: Views from the Ground

on Unmanned Aircraft. Security Studies, 28(2), 216-249. doi:10.1080/09636412.2019.1551565