Autonomous aircraft have been in the spotlight since the start of the Ukraine war, causing commercial drones to change tactics almost overnight and prompting policymakers to call for a renewed focus on autonomy on the ground.
The U.S. Department of Defense is at a critical crossroads as it thinks creatively and ambitiously about how to leverage this important new technology at scale for strategic advantage.
The past decade has seen significant technological advancements on the ground. American roads are currently undergoing an AI-driven revolution that has significant implications for both economic competitiveness and national security. After years and billions of dollars of private sector research and development, autonomous vehicles are here.
Autonomous technology will soon begin to fundamentally change how goods and people move, but its impact may soon reach far beyond American roads: AVs will change the strategy of modern ground warfare, saving lives and protecting military personnel from many dangerous situations.
For years, the U.S. Army has experimented with autonomous ground operations, in which a human-driven lead vehicle sets the course for one or more autonomous follower vehicles. While the “lead and follow” approach frees up manpower and reduces the potential for human casualties, it also makes the lead vehicle a high-value target. If a single lead vehicle fails, the entire convoy can be put at risk.
The technology developed for “leader-followers” was a major innovation, but in the past five years, U.S. commercial self-driving developers have leapfrogged many of the Defense Department-funded efforts. Passengers can now hail driverless taxis in several cities, and developers plan to deploy the first driverless trucks next year. No “leader” vehicle is required.
While these vehicles are not yet as resourceful as human drivers, they are programmed to safely stop, pull over, return to base and even call humans to provide remote assistance.
Encouraged by this progress, the Defense Innovation Unit, in partnership with the Army, has begun piloting a program to leverage commercially available autonomy solutions to make the Robotic Combat Vehicle fully autonomous in 2022. Through this defense procurement approach, the Department of Defense benefits from continuous software improvements learned every day on American roads, while de-risking technology investments and ensuring solutions are developed and integrated at the right speed.
The Army continues to explore the best use cases for utilizing AVs for high-risk missions such as resupply, reconnaissance support, casualty evacuation, route clearance, and explosive ordnance disposal. The use of human-robot teams provides a solution to a long-standing challenge for ground forces: developing a workforce that can be leveraged for force multiplication. Enabling each soldier to control a fleet of small ground and air systems addresses this challenge and dramatically increases the capability and flexibility of deployed forces.
Human-robot teams provide additional capabilities beyond what humans can do alone. Low-cost, expendable autonomous systems can overwhelm enemy forces by saturating the operational area to outmaneuver, detect, and target the enemy. Deception can be used to confuse the enemy’s operational situation by making it difficult to distinguish between real targets and decoys.
Ground vehicles can also be equipped with ISR assets and short-range air and missile defense systems and navigate autonomously to deployment positions to provide greater situational awareness, planning, lethality, decision support, and more distributed and enhanced protection for soldiers in theater.
Rethinking Army Procurement
But to take full advantage of this burgeoning technology and capitalize on the incredible advances being made in the private sector, the Army must rethink its acquisition strategy and embrace new operating concepts. While the Ukraine crisis has prompted the Army to double down on its existing focus on resiliency and lethality to better prepare for high-intensity conflict, it must also think hard about how to inject redundancy, flexibility, and adaptability into its force structure through autonomous systems.
It’s a common myth in the defense industry that the civilian industry can only function with fixed infrastructure, well-maintained roads, and structured environments. In reality, America’s highways are just as incredibly unpredictable an environment as the Army’s vehicles must deal with.
The millions of miles of autonomous driving on public roads that these companies have achieved give them a significant advantage in adapting their mature systems to make meaningful progress in complex environments, off-road, and in vehicles without human drivers. Commercially operating companies can deliver autonomous solutions to the military faster as they move beyond scientific experiments and lab demonstrations to product development and delivery.
When it comes to adopting large-scale ground autonomy, the U.S. military needs to think ambitiously about how to leverage advances in the private sector to gain a meaningful strategic advantage for the military.
Don Burnett is founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics, an autonomous vehicle technology supplier based in Mountain View, Calif. Lt. Gen. Joe Anderson (retired) is a former vice chief of staff of the Army.
