Robotic combat vehicles equipping U.S. Army armored brigades is a pending reality. The first units will get robots in Fiscal 2028. But can they effectively use them?
It’s a question the Army’s Human-Machine Integration (HMI) effort seeks to answer. On the face of it, an armored company or brigade with its own combat robots sounds like a great idea.
The concept posits putting robotic combat vehicles (RCVs) in the vanguard of the formation to reconnoiter, sense and punch through enemy obstacles, all the while taking some of the risk away from troops.
At the Army’s annual AUSA conference in Washington, DC last fall, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, enthused that, “These integrated formations will bring robotic systems into units alongside humans, with the goal of always having robots, not soldiers, make first contact with the enemy.”
It’s a laudable goal if not a practical one today and likely for many years to come.
At the same conference Major General Curtis Buzzard, commander of the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Moore, Georgia, said the Service sees integrated RCVs, “collecting intelligence, doing surveillance, sniffing for chemical/biological weapons, setting up counter-drone systems and doing breaching missions…”
While more specific than Secretary Wormuth, Maj.Gen. Buzzard’s vision requires the Army to cover miles of developmental and conceptual ground before it can hope to operate in such a fashion.
Brigadier General, Geoffrey Norman, director of the Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicles Cross Functional Team (CFT) appreciates the distance.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, he acknowledged the challenge, telling me, “This is a campaign of learning that will take place over the course of several years to determine what are the best materiel, software, network and organizational solutions to get human and machine integration.”
Beyond learning, a number of elements have to come together for the Army to make its FY’28 fielding date. Ideally, it will have to wait for technology to catch up. That applies to the network and software required to make a coordinated manned-unmanned formation fight as one.
For example, the Army foresees one soldier controlling many robots. Norman says “there’s no doubt” this will happen over time. But the autonomy necessary to make it a reality hasn’t arrived.
For now, instead of “one controlling many”, many soldiers will control one RCV. In that sense, RCV could also stand for Remote Controlled Vehicle.
In the experiments it has done with a variety of RCV surrogates since 2019, the Army has worked with a trio of vehicles. “The building block we’re working with is one control vehicle to two robots,” Norman explains. Currently, two operators are required to control each robot.
“To have two robots [in a formation] requires four operators, four RCV control personnel,” he says. “We can put all of them in one control vehicle. Our preference is that the control vehicle is either the new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle [the AMPV, which is replacing the venerable M113 armored personnel carrier] or another platform like a Stryker
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The Human-Machine Integration effort (basically the RCV concept) is under development in parallel with the RCV program-of-record. That program will ultimately select the robotic vehicle and the payloads it will carry, the control vehicle, and the software and radios that will form the network that connects them.
The Army initially envisioned a family of RCVs broken into light, medium and heavy variants. It has since decided to field just one robotic vehicle type which pairs some of the elements of the previous RCV medium concept with an RCV light chassis.
Norman and the CFT informally describe the cross between the small and medium variants as an “RCV smedium”. Whimsy aside, the Army will just call the robots RCVs.
They are expected to be tracked or wheeled vehicles with a gross weight of 8,500 pounds or less and a maximum payload of up to 7,000 pounds. They’ll have hybrid-electric drivetrains and be able to carry a range of payloads from mortars to machine guns or precision-guided missiles to smoke obscuration modules.
Four industry teams are building robotic combat vehicle prototypes for the program; Team McQ, which includes McQ Inc., HDT Global and BAE Systems – General Dynamics
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Three of the prototypes are tracked RCVs and one is wheeled. While the industry teams move forward with them, the CFT is forging ahead with experiments using surrogate RCV demonstrators. While there’s a lot of work to do, Brig. Gen, Norman points out that the Army has been busy.
“The things we’ve done already have been very fruitful. Some of it has been live experimentation in the field, some has been experimentation at the Army’s Maneuver Battle Lab at Fort Moore in Georgia, some has been virtual experimentation at the Detroit Arsenal.”
The experiments have brought together RCV demonstrators, control vehicles, a command-and-control network and units like the 1st Cavalry Division’s 17th Cavalry Regiment. These elements were combined at the Army’s large-scale Project Convergence experimental exercise in 2022 and in subsequent exercises. Altogether, they’ve given the CFT a conceptual baseline to work from.
That baseline is manifest in the experimental “RCV platoon”, a formation which builds on the vehicle trio mentioned above. It includes four RCV demonstrators and two control vehicles.
Each RCV control vehicle (an AMPV) has a driver and vehicle commander. They’re joined by four RCV operators. That makes for six people in each control vehicle. The Army may add a supervisor or Squad leader to each control vehicle as well.
“We think this platoon could be 12 to 14 people with the four robots, integrated as part of a tank company, part of a mechanized infantry company or maybe we put multiple RCV platoons together to form a Robotic Autonomous Systems Company,” Norman says.
The concept will evolve as experiments go forward. It may even take a direction like the Air Force’s Loyal Wingman idea wherein a combat vehicle (a tank for example) is paired directly with an RCV cutting out the control vehicle. Autonomy will have to advance to make it possible, but the USAF’s fighter-drone team experiments are already showing the feasibility.
The CFT will test the RCV platoon concept at the next Project Convergence in March 2024 during the “Capstone 4” phase of the exercise at Fort Irwin, California. An RCV platoon will work with different possible formation structures and capabilities.
Later next summer the platoon will return to Fort Irwin. These and other simulations throughout 2024 are part of the years-long campaign of learning to which Norman referred above.
Among the lessons Norman expects the CFT will learn will be the fundamental robustness required of the robots, control vehicles and C2 network.
“It’s going to be important that the control vehicles and RCVs can be maintained by mechanics that are part of an armored brigade… There are threats throughout the battlefield and control vehicles will need to be well enough protected against mines, IEDs, artillery, and machine guns for the [RCV] operators and control technologies inside to survive.”
Eventually distributing RCV control away from these specific vehicles to a range of combat platforms from heavy and light tanks to the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle follow-on XM30 and perhaps one day to helicopters or aerial drones can make RCV C2 less predictable and less of a target.
General Norman is aware of the electronic warfare and cyber threats that could up-end any RCV formation. While he won’t discuss countermeasures, he affirms that the CFT is thinking through these challenges.
Connected hybrid vehicles, manned or unmanned, will have to be able to fight in degraded environments with limited connectivity and dense electromagnetic energy. The robots and their networks will have to fail gracefully to be worth anything to soldiers facing a peer or near peer adversary.
One solution may be enabling human operators to control robots as they would manned platforms Norman observes.
“In the future, our commanders could issue instructions to robots just as they would to a human platoon Sergeant whether they use voice commands that get translated into machine language that is transmitted to the RCV or through digital commands transmitted to human platoon leaders and robots.”
Last but far from least, the Human-Machine Integration effort will have to determine whether RCVs can give the Army the bang-for-buck it needs given future budgets.
“It’s a central question for us,” Norman acknowledges. “It would not surprise me if the initial capabilities are more expensive than we would like. As we achieve economies of scale and start procuring more robots, the cost per system will decrease. The key is to make sure that our initial cost barriers to entry don’t preclude us from getting into RCVs at scale.”
In other words, the Army shouldn’t expect its RCVs to be exquisite tools with high levels of capability at first. Nor will they be significantly cheaper than manned platforms though they may help the Army realize savings over time.
RCVs will likely do basic tasks in the field. Secretary Wormuth’s goal of always having robots, not soldiers, make first contact with the enemy will be deferred, probably for well over a decade. And the enemy will always have a say in the proposition.
In the meantime, Brig.Gen. Norman, the Army and industry have a ton of learning to do in a few short years.
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