Will robotics become an essential part of future warfare?

The Tampa Tribune / TBO.com

Howard Altman Columns

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Was a new era of warfare ushered in on Feb. 18?

Skip Parish thinks so.

The Sarasota-based unmanned-systems inventor and innovator said on that night, according to Ukraine military officials, a Ukraine munitions dump was attacked by waves of small drones operated by Russian forces.

Parish didn’t see the attack but said he was told about it while meeting with Ukraine military officials at the time to advise them on ways to counter Russian unmanned systems.

Unian, a Ukrainian news agency, reported that “according to the head of the press service of the General Staff, Vladyslav Seleznyov, a military depot in Zaporizhia region was bombed with incendiary objects dropped from unmanned aerial vehicles.

The resulting fire was very difficult to extinguish, with over 50 pits of fire recorded across the territory of the warehouse.”

An official with the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., Ilya Timokhov, said, “My guess is that this particular case didn’t have anything to do with the drones.”

“First of all let me reiterate that there is no Russian military presence on the territory of Ukraine,” said Timokhov, first secretary at the Russian Embassy currently focusing on the conflict in Ukraine. “Neither (are) the Russian Armed Forces operating any machinery there.”

“Secondly, as far as I understand … this location is too far of a distance even from the Donbass, leave alone Russia,” said Timokhov. “So it would be too far-fetched to allege that the drone was operated by someone in Russia or even the ‘separatists’ for the matter of fact.”

Parish insists that what he was told is true. And to him, it’s not that there was anything overly significant about what was attacked. Or why.

It’s the “how” that has Parish, who just returned from another trip to Ukraine, intrigued.

Beyond a few mentions in the Ukraine media, there has been little reporting on the incident. Officials from NATO could not be reached for comment and U.S. European Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the region could not comment by deadline.

More than touching off fires, Parish says, the attack has touched off a new way of war.

The repercussions have been swift.

“The Russians had backpack drones,” he says. “You put them in a backpack, sneak in somewhere and let them go. As a result of that, the counter move is on to get those. Ukraine wants to buy 1,000 little drones.”

The ongoing battles between Ukraine and Russia and its separatist allies has become a laboratory in modern military techniques, Parish says.

The drone attacks “did not cause a lot of damage,” he says. “But it essentially started a whole new type of warfare. As soon one does it, the other does it.”

It would be “a whole new paradigm” in weaponry, says Parish — low-cost, ubiquitous and, ultimately, effective.

“It has all the characteristics of a rapidly advancing type of warfare.”

Recounting something he has told me in the past, Parish says that more and more, the advantage enjoyed by U.S. drones, operating in virtually uncontested airspace, is diminishing, as other nations, particularly the Russians and Ukrainians, move more rapidly to drone-on-drone warfare and ground-based countermeasures against drones.

There is another implication to an attack like the one Parish described.

An attack by small drones like that means that relatively inexpensive, off-the-shelf technology has been weaponized, essentially mitigating the overall advantage enjoyed by the U.S. with its technological edge.

That technology gap was something Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley brought up during his testimony last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“We are already seeing that gap closed today,” said Milley, citing the need for continuing research and development.

Totally independent of the incident Parish is discussing, Milley said the future of warfare will increasingly be robotic.

“I do see a very, very significant increased use of robotic — both manually controlled and autonomous — in ground warfare over the coming years,” Milley said. Not “some sort of revolution like we’re going to go from the horse to the tank or the musket to the rifle, but I do see the introduction, at about the 10-year mark or so, really widespread use of robotics in ground warfare.”

This is already happening, Milley said, “in air platforms and we’re seeing it in naval platforms. The ground warfare is a much more complex environment, dirty environment, but I do anticipate that we’re going to refine the use of robots significantly and there’ll be a large use of them in ground combat by, call it 2030.”

Parish, on the other hand, does see the technological advancements, especially by Russia and Ukraine, “as akin to seeing the first tank on the battleground in World War I.”

Just before leaving for Europe, where he will brief NATO military officers on counter-drone measures, Parish says that he has “a pretty good respect for Russian technology and their ability to field it.”

That “turned on the switch” inside Ukraine, where officials are wondering, “Where is our stuff?”

Other nations in the region want to catch up as well, Parish says.

“The rest of Europe is coming along. The border states, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania — they are all more concerned about this than, say, we are in the U.S.”

So what is the U.S. up to on the drone front?

The folks at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency have something in the works.

The agency, better known as DARPA, says that the capability to send large numbers of small unmanned air systems with coordinated, distributed capabilities “could provide U.S. forces with improved operational flexibility at much lower cost than is possible with today’s expensive, all-in-one platforms—especially if those unmanned systems could be retrieved for reuse while airborne.”

But so far, DARPA says, “the technology to project volleys of low-cost, reusable systems over great distances and retrieve them in mid-air has remained out of reach.”

Enter the Gremlin, a reusable drone that can be sent on different types of missions.

“Named for the imaginary, mischievous imps that became the good luck charms of many British pilots during World War II, the program seeks to show the feasibility of conducting safe, reliable operations involving multiple air-launched, air-recoverable unmanned systems,” DARPA says.

The goal is to have a “proof-of-concept” fight demonstration that would show the system works to deliver drones for non-lethal purposes like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance “in a robust, responsive and affordable manner,” said Dan Patt, DARPA program manager.

DARPA’s vision is to launch groups of Gremlins from bombers or cargo planes and even fighters or other small aircraft that are out of range of enemy defenses. When the Gremlins complete their mission, a C-130 transport aircraft would retrieve them in the air and carry them home, where ground crews would prepare them for their next use within 24 hours, according to DARPA.

Late last month, DARPA announced that the Gremlin project’s Phase 1 contracts were awarded to four teams.

When Parish gets back, I’ll find out how things are going with NATO on the drone front.

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The Pentagon announced no new deaths in its ongoing operations.

There have been 2,347 U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, 21 U.S. troop deaths and one civilian Department of Defense employee death in support of the follow-up Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan, and 12 troop deaths and one civilian death in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the fight against the so-called Islamic State.