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According to a new report from Bloomberg, the Pentagon is spending approximately $1 billion over the next several years for a variety of robots designed to complement combat troops on the modern battlefield. In addition to scouting and explosives disposal, these new war robots will reportedly be able to perform more complex tasks, including surveillance missions, detection of chemical or nuclear agents, and even have the ability to transport soldiers’ rucksacks. “Within five years, I have no doubt there will be robots in every Army formation,” said Bryan McVeigh, the Army’s project manager for force protection. He applauded the efforts of the Pentagon to field more than 800 robots over the past 18 months. Bloomberg says the Pentagon has classified its robot platforms into light, medium and heavy categories. Last month, the Army awarded a $429.1 million contract to two Massachusetts robotic defense companies, Endeavor Robotics and QinetiQ North America, for miniature size war robots weighing less than 25 pounds. Not too long ago, Endeavor Robotics was awarded two other contracts worth roughly $34 million from the Marine Corps for medium size robots. Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System. (Source: QinetiQ)  In 4Q17, the Army awarded Endeavor a $158.5 million contract for 1,200 medium size war robots, called the Man-Transportable Robotic System (MTRS), Increment II, weighing around 165 pounds. Bloomberg said the MTRS is designed to detect “explosives as well as chemical, biological, radioactive and nuclear threats,” with a deployment date set for the second half of 2019. Endeavor Robotics Product Overview. (Source: Endeavor Robotics) “It’s a recognition that ground robots can do a lot more, and there’s a lot of capabilities that can and should be exploited,” said Sean Bielat, Endeavor’s chief executive officer. He points out “the dull, the dirty and the dangerous” infantry tasks are being supplemented by war robots. The introduction of war robots onto the modern battlefield is undoubtedly intended to streamline tasks in combat situations for infantry troops, but the primary objective is to increase the survivability rate of America’s bravest warriors. While Trump signed the record-setting defense spending bill earlier this year, Bloomberg says the addition of robots on the battlefield is geared towards affordability. “If we want to change payloads, then we can spend our money on changing the payloads and not having to change the whole system,” McVeigh said. The Army will have a ramp-up period to field the use of its newer, more advanced robots; indications point to more than 2,500 of the medium and small robots will enter the modern battlefield in the next several years. Line-up of QinetiQ robots. (Source: QinetiQ)  There are significant concerns about the rapid development and deployment of advanced robotic technologies on the battlefield, especially the use of autonomous weapon systems. Last year, a group of the world’s leading AI researchers and humanitarian organizations warned about lethal autonomous weapons systems, or killer robots, that select and kill targets without human control. About two dozen countries have called for the ban on fully autonomous weapons, though the U.S. failed to join. Killer robots are closer than you think “It seems inevitable that technology is taking us to a point where countries will face the question of whether to delegate lethal decision-making to machines,” said Paul Scharre, a senior fellow and director of the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security. Last August, Tesla’s Elon Musk and over 100 experts sent a letter to the United Nations demanding the organization ban lethal autonomous weapons. “Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend,” the letter warned. “These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.” Peter W. Singer, a leading strategist on 21st-century warfare, chatted with Business Insider about the “the killer robots debate,” and said, “it sounds like science fiction, but it is a very real debate right now in international relations. There have been multiple UN meetings on this.” As Singer put it, advanced robotic technologies have opened countless discussions about legal and ethical questions for which “we’re really not all that ready.” It seems like the new frontier of war and technology is ushering in a “Terminator”-style dystopic evolution of warfare. It is inevitable that this new generation of weaponry could quickly make its way out of the military and into the hands of terrorist organizations. Nevertheless, with the Pentagon throwing billions of dollars at defense companies to manufacture war robots, we ask one simple question: what could go wrong? View the full article

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation, A hot topic in military prognostications regarding China, Russia and the United States revolves around the development and use of hypersonic technology for missiles or UAVs as an invulnerable means of attack. As we will see, not all three countries are dealing successfully with this task. The United States, China and Russia have in recent years increased their efforts to equip their armed forces with such highly destructive missiles and vehicles seen in the previous article. Putin’s recent speech in Moscow reflects this course of direction by presenting a series of weapons with hypersonic characteristics, as seen with the Avangard and the Dagger. As confirmed by US Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Dr. Michael Griffin: Further confirmation that the US is lagging in this field came from General John Hyten, Commander of US Strategic Command: The development of hypersonic weapons has been part of the military doctrine that China and Russia have been developing for quite some time, driven by various motivations. For one thing, it is a means of achieving strategic parity with the United States without having to match Washington’s unparallelled spending power. The amount of military hardware possessed by the United States cannot be matched by any other armed force, an obvious result of decades of military expenditure estimated to be in the range of five to 15 times that of its nearest competitors. For these reasons, the US Navy is able to deploy ten carrier groups, hundreds of aircraft, and engage in thousands of weapon-development programs. Over a number of decades, the US war machine has seen its direct adversaries literally vanish, firstly following the Second World War, and then following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This led in the 1990s to shift in focus from one opposing peer competitors to one dealing with smaller and less sophisticated opponents (Yugoslavia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, international terrorism). Accordingly, less funds were devoted to research in cutting-edge technology for new weapons systems in light of these changed circumstances. This strategic decision obliged the US military-industrial complex to slow down advanced research and to concentrate more on large-scale sales of new versions of aircraft, tanks, submarines and ships. With exorbitant costs and projects lasting up to two decades, this led to systems that were already outdated by the time they rolled off the production lines. All these problems had little visibility until 2014, when the concept of great-power competition returned with a vengeance, and with it the need for the US to compare its level of firepower with that of its peer competitors. Forced by circumstances to pursue a different path, China and Russia begun a rationalization of their armed forces from the end of the 1990s, focusing on those areas that would best allow them the ability to defend against the United States’ overwhelming military power. It is no coincidence that Russia has strongly accelerated its missile-defense program by producing such modern systems as Pantsir and S-300/S-400, which allows for a defense against ballistic attacks and stealth aircraft. Countering stealth technology became an urgent imperative, and with the production of the S-400, this challenge has been overcome. With the future S-500, even ICBMs will no longer pose a problem for Russia. In a similar vein, China has strongly accelerated its ICBM program, reaching within a decade the ability to produce a credible deterrent with their equivalent of the Russian SS-18 Satan or the American LGM-30G Minuteman III, possessing a long range and multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) armed with nuclear warheads. After sealing the skies and achieving a robust nuclear-strategic parity with the United States, Moscow and Beijing begun to focus their attention on the US anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) systems placed along their borders, which also consist of the AEGIS system operated by US naval ships. As Putin warned, this posed an existential threat that compromised Russia and China’s second-strike capability in response to any American nuclear first strike, thereby disrupting the strategic balance inherent in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). For this reason, Putin has since 2007 been warning Russia’s western partners that his country would develop a system to nullify the American ABM system. In the space of a few years, Russia and China have succeeded in this task, testing and entering into production various hypersonic missiles equipped with breakthrough technologies that will strongly benefit the entire scientific sector of these two countries, and against which the US currently has no counter. Currently there are no defenses against hypersonic attacks; and given the trend of employing ramjet/scramjet engines on new generations of fighter jets, it seems that more and more countries will want to equip themselves with these game-changing systems. Russia, to counter America’s naval superiority, has already entered into service the Zircon anti-ship missile, and already plans an export version with a range of 300 kms. India and Russia have long been working on the Brahmos, which is yet another type of hypersonic missile that could in the future be launched from the Su-57. Although it is a relatively new technology, hypersonic weapons are already causing more than a headache for many Western military planners, who are only coming to realize just how far they are lagging behind their competitors. It will take a while for the US to close the hypersonic technological and scientific gap with China and Russia. Lockheed Martin has been awarded a contract to this end. In the meantime, the two Eurasian powerhouses are focusing on their overland integration via the Belt And Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasian Union, a strategic arrangement that denies the US and NATO the ability to easily intervene in an area so far inland, compounded by its inability to control the airspace, and ultimately outnumbered on the ground in any case. The objective of the Russians and the Chinese is the realization of a highly defended (A2/AD) environment on their coasts and in their skies, which are buttressed by hypersonic weapons. In this way, Russia and China possess the means to disrupt the maritime logistical chain of the US Navy in the case of war. In addition, the A2/AD would be able to stop US power projection, thanks to HGV weapons able to sink aircraft carriers and target specific land-based ABM systems or logistic-chain hubs. It is a defensive strategy that could potentially halt US Naval power projection as well as its ability to control the skies, two linchpins in the way the US plans to fight its wars. No wonder think-tanks in Washington and four-star generals are starting to sound the alarm on hypersonic weapons. View the full article

After last Thursday's relatively brief meeting in Sochi between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syria's Bashar al-Assad wherein Putin stressed that it is necessary for all "foreign forces" to withdraw from Syria, there's been much speculation over what Putin actually meant.  Many were quick to point out that Assad had agreed that "illegal foreign forces" should exit Syria — meaning those uninvited occupying forces in the north and northeast, namely, US troops, Turkish troops and their proxies, and all foreign jihadists — while most mainstream Western outlets, CNN and the Washington Post among them, hailed Putin's request to see Iran withdraw from Syria.  Whatever non-Syrian entity Putin intended to include by his words, both Syria and Iran gave their unambiguous response on Monday: Iran announced it would stay in Syria at the request of the Assad government. Syrians wave Iranian, Russian and Syrian flags during a protest against previous U.S.-led air strikes in Damascus. Image source: Reuters via Hindustan Times“Should the Syrians want us, we will continue to be there,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi declared from Tehran, cited by Iran's state-run IRNA news agency. “Nobody can force Iran to do anything; Iran has its own independent policies,” Qasemi said, in response to a question referencing the widespread reports that Russia desires Iran to withdraw forces from Syria.   “Those who entered Syria without the permission of the Syrian government are the ones that must leave the country,” he said further in a clear reference to the some 2000 US troops currently occupying Syrian-Kurdish areas in the northeast and eastern parts of the country.    As we noted in the aftermath of Israel's May 10 massive attack on multiple locations inside Syria which marked the biggest military escalations between the two countries in decades, Russia has appeared content to stay on the sidelines while Syria and Israel test confrontational limits; however, Russia is carefully balancing its interests in Syria, eager to avoid an uncontrolled escalation leading to a direct great power confrontation.  But increasingly Israel's patience appears to be wearing thin after Prime Minister Netanyahu's oft-repeated "Iranian red line" warning has gone unheeded. In multiple summits with Putin going back to 2015 (the two have met over 6 times since then), Netanyahu has repeatedly stressed he would not tolerate an Iranian presence in Syria and further signaled willingness to go to war in Syria to curtail Iranian influence.  "Iran is already well on its way to controlling Iraq, Yemen and to a large extent is already in practice in control of Lebanon," Netanyahu told Putin in one especially tense meeting in August 2017, and added further that, "We cannot forget for a single minute that Iran threatens every day to annihilate Israel. Israel opposes Iran's continued entrenchment in Syria. We will be sure to defend ourselves with all means against this and any threat." Israel's uptick in military strikes on Syria — attacks on sites purported to be Iranian bases housing Iranian assets — have intensified exponentially over the past half-year, nearly leading to an unprecedented breakout of region wide war during the May 10 exchange of fire, wherein Israel claimed to have been attacked by Iranian rocket fire.  The fact that both Iran and Syria can so openly and confidently announce Iran's intent to stay in Syria means Damascus sees itself in new position of strength after both shooting down multiple Israeli missiles and simultaneously firing rockets into Israeli occupied Golan territory — a response perhaps very unexpected by Israel's leadership which had grown accustomed to attacking the Syrian army and its allies with impunity.  Meanwhile, Damascus announced Monday that all suburbs around the capital have been fully liberated from al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists, marking the end of a years long insurgency in and around the capital. As Al-Masdar News noted, "The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) is in full control of Damascus city and its countryside for the first time since the advent of this conflict." Yet the pattern which has emerged over the past few years has been that every time the Syrian Army emerges victorious or carries overwhelming military momentum, Israel or the US launches an attack.  The US for its part issued one of its strongest ultimatums yet to Iran yet via Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who vowed on Monday that Tehran will struggle to “keep its economy alive” if it does not comply with a list of 12 US demands, including Iranian withdrawal from Syria. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani rejected Pompeo's bombastic demands and vowed to continue “our path,” insisting that the US could not "decide for the world." Rouhani's words, as quoted by ILNA news agency, were as follows: “Who are you to decide for Iran and the world? The world today does not accept America to decide for the world, as countries are independent ... that era is over... We will continue our path with the support of our nation.” This continuing escalation of rhetoric will likely only ensure Iran becomes even more entrenched in Syria, but it will be interesting to see how Russia responds diplomatically. We've already seen Israel's "diplomacy" in the form of repeat missile attacks, but how much will Russia and Iran sit back and take before enforcing their own red lines against Israel and the West?  View the full article