Robots humble US Army in wargames
Robots humble
US Army in wargames
The mission involved dislodging a
defending company of infantry, about 120 soldiers, with a single platoon of
just 40 attackers on foot
How
big a difference does it make when you reinforce foot
troops with drones and ground robots? You get about a 10–fold
increase in combat power, according to a recent Army wargame.
“Their capabilities were awesome,” said
Army Capt. Philip Belanger, a Ranger Regiment and Stryker
Brigade veteran who commanded a robot-reinforced platoon in nearly a dozen
computer-simulated battles at the Fort Benning’s Maneuver Battle Lab. “We
reduced the risk to US forces to zero, basically, and still were able to
accomplish the mission.”
According to a special report from Sydney
J. Freedberg Jr. in Breaking Defense, that mission involved dislodging a
defending company of infantry, about 120 soldiers, with a single platoon of
just 40 attackers on foot.
That’s a task that would normally be
assigned to a battalion of over 600. In other words, instead of the minimum 3:1
superiority in numbers that military tradition requires for a successful
attack, Belanger’s simulated force was outnumbered 1:3.
When they ran the scenario without futuristic
technologies, using the infantry platoon as it exists today, “that did not go
well for us,” Belanger said drily.
But that was just the warm-up, getting
the captain and his four human subordinates – three lieutenants and a staff
sergeant, each commanding a simulated squad – familiar with the
Army’s OneSAF software. That’s a complex physics-based model so fine-grained
it can assess whether an individual (simulated) soldier is killed, wounded or
unscathed in any given attack.
OneSAF also strictly limits the amount of
information each human player gets. They only know what their simulated
soldiers on the battlefield could, so it replicates the fog of war, if not the
fear, the report said.
Wargame organizers then added dozens of
unmanned systems to the simulation. The immediate impact was on what Belanger
and his team could see. Instead of being limited to the immediate field of view
of their simulated soldiers, they could send the drones ahead to scout. Instead
of being able to engage the enemy about 500 meters away (not quite a third of a
mile) – or less in dense terrain like a jungle or a city – they could spot and
attack them from 5,000 meters (more than three miles).
“It was awesome to be able to increase
that zone of where we knew exactly what was going on, without being right on
top of the enemy,” Belanger told me. “We were able to pretty much control the
amount of area that probably a battalion-minus would have been able to control,
with just one platoon.”
That doesn’t mean it was easy to adapt to
the new tools.
“The first time we used them was
definitely a learning curve,” Belanger said. Drones can move much faster than
ground robots, but they can’t carry as much firepower as a ground
vehicle of similar size and cost, the report said.
So, at first the fliers rushed ahead,
found the enemy position, and then had to wait for the ground units to catch
up. Meanwhile the opposing players, controlling the enemy force, noticed the
drones and, although they weren’t able to shoot them down – something unlikely
to be true with, say, the Russians – they could use the time to ready
their defenses. Belanger’s manned-unmanned team still won, but not as
decisively as they wanted to.
“Our UAS [Unmanned Aerial Systems] were
able to identify exactly where enemy were, but we were unable to kill them
without our ground vehicles,” he said. “You have to figure out how you’re going
to mass combat power,” rather than attack piecemeal.
“As we did more and more iterations, we
were able to build in more control measures and have more of … a human in
the loop,” Belanger told me. “After about the second or third run with all the
advanced systems,” he said, the human players were able to coordinate the air
and ground robots in a single synchronized assault.
Coordinating these high-tech combined
arms – aerial drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and human foot soldiers – was a
lot more complex than leading an ordinary infantry platoon, Belanger said.
While young troops who grew up on video know how to use computer control interfaces,
they may not have the tactical experience required.
“Usually a platoon leader is a brand-new
second or first lieutenant. Are they the right person for that job?” he asked.
“[Should] a captain be leading a 40-person platoon” – as Belanger did in the
wargame – “or is it a subject matter expert we don’t currently
have in the Army?”
The technologies Capt. Belanger’s platoon
used in the simulation don’t exist in real life – yet. But they are all
feasible in the fairly near term, insisted Ted Maciuba, a retired Army officer
who’s now deputy director of robotic requirements at Fort
Benning’s Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate.
“These are things that industry and the
Army labs said they could do,” Maciuba said.
What’s next? The Army wants to build
actual prototypes of select technologies for a series of real-world field tests
and experiments in 2020. A formal Request For Proposals – informed by the white
papers and the wargame – will come out shortly, he said, with proposals to be
submitted in January.
Working with Georgia Tech Research
Institute, the Army will try out the individual prototypes, then integrate them
together into a series of increasingly complex experiments, culminating in a
full “system of systems” field exercise this coming September.
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