Robotics revolutionary

Courtesy Photo | Then-Staff Sgt. Paul Scharre poses with Iraqi children in Diyala province, Iraq, as part of the opening of an elementary school in Baqubah in 2008. (Photo courtesy of Paul Scharre)  

UNITED STATES

04.01.2017

Courtesy Story

U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center

Former Army Ranger Paul Scharre, drawing on his experience in uniform, then in OSD and now at a private-sector think tank, fears DOD bureaucratic resistance could pump the brakes on progress in machine intelligence.

by Ms. Margaret C. Roth

It couldn’t be a much bigger leap from Southwest Asia to downtown Washington, yet, for Paul Scharre, the two could hardly be more closely connected. What Scharre experienced as an Army Ranger deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—his first look at how robots could mitigate the huge toll that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were taking on Soldiers—led him directly to what he’s doing now as a civilian: senior fellow and director of the Future of Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security.

In just 10 years, Scharre (rhymes with “sorry” but with “sh” instead of “s”) has seen warfare from three distinct vantage points: the battlefield, as a graduate of the Army’s Airborne, Ranger and Sniper schools and honor graduate of the 75th Ranger Regiment’s Ranger Indoctrination Program; the bureaucracy (the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) from 2008 to 2013); and now the more bookish community of analysts in Washington that aims to make sense of the big picture and influence our nation’s defense. At OSD, he played a leading role in establishing policies on unmanned and autonomous systems and emerging weapon technologies, heading the working group that drafted DOD Directive 3000.09 on autonomy in weapon systems. Scharre also led DOD efforts to set policies on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) programs and directed-energy technologies.

With an M.A. in political economy and public policy and a B.S. in physics, Scharre is wholly engrossed in how new technologies translate to warfighting doctrine and acquisition—and he is passionately aware of how long that can take.

With the increased freedom he now has as a former DOD insider looking more broadly at the defense establishment from the outside, Scharre talked with Army AL&T magazine in February about what the Pentagon needs to do to take appropriate advantage of the rapid advances in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapon systems. As he perhaps understated it, “I’m just saying, as an observer here, these might be things that the U.S. military can do to be more effective and stay competitive.”

Army AL&T: We were intrigued by your operational background and the amount of thought you’ve given to the topic of robotics and artificial intelligence. How did you get from there to here?

Scharre: When I was in the Army, I saw how decisions in Washington and the Pentagon really affected people downrange. When I first came to the Pentagon, we were working on a suite of different capabilities to try to make the Pentagon’s sluggish bureaucracy more responsive to the warfighters in the field. Things like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were huge issues at the time, and unmanned vehicles are a part of that.

But over time, robotics became a bigger and bigger issue. I think people inside DOD began to realize the potential of what I would describe as kind of an accidental robotics revolution that happened—the Predator [unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)] and Gray Eagle, and then large numbers of smaller unmanned aircraft or drones, like the Wasp and Raven, thousands of those things that gave troops the ability to look over hills and around corners. I worked on the receiving end of this [demand], and there was just this tremendous appetite for more ISR, what Secretary Gates [Robert M. Gates, secretary of defense from December 2006 to July 2011] described as this “insatiable demand.”

And what I saw—which was really disheartening but also educational for me—was the immense resistance within the bureaucracy to respond to the needs of the warfighter on this issue. Secretary Gates had to direct a stand-alone ISR task force to respond to the needs.

The needs from the COCOMs [combatant commands] were massive and just swamped the ability of the bureaucracy to understand. And rather than try to say, OK, here’s a legitimate need by warfighters for emerging technology that’s really valuable—and you know our current processes don’t really make it possible, feasible or affordable to respond to these needs, so we need to find better ways of doing business (which there are lots of opportunities to do, because it’s a new technology—instead the response of the bureaucracy was basically to reject the warfighters’ needs, to just say no. And it was really only because Secretary Gates forced it on the U.S. Air Force that the Air Force grew the number of Predator or Reaper air patrols from initial small numbers, like 12, up to 50 and 60, 65 and 70 [24/7 orbits] over time.

As soon as Gates left, there was pushback within the bureaucracy. The Air Force in particular was taking its foot off the pedal and doing less. And I think it’s an indictment of the bureaucracy that we’ve [also] seen across other areas like MRAPs [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles]. The Air Force is not unique in this. I think the Army’s failure to respond in a timely fashion on MRAPs is just unconscionable and a disgrace.

I think this is a continual problem that the bureaucracy has. The system is designed to think long term about what the future force might need in some unknown, nebulous time frame. When there are immediate needs today, people in the bureaucracy—it’s not that they don’t care; they don’t think that it’s their job to respond to those needs. And the system is so slow that it’s not easy to [respond]. So I’m getting off the topic of robotics, but it’s something that I’m passionate about.

I think speed is really fundamental in this type of international environment we’re living in today. We have a very different military than we had almost 30 years ago at the end of the Cold War, but we’re dealing with bureaucracies that are an outgrowth of institutions that we created in the Cold War. Today we have a wider set of possible challenges. We’re competing against actors like terrorist groups that don’t have the kinds of bureaucracies we have.

That’s going to be a challenge in future wars as well. Whether it’s a big war or small war, whether it’s a war against a terrorist group or another nation-state, you’ve got to be constantly adapting and evolving.

And that’s a really vital lesson that we need to be imparting in our institutions: that the types of threats that we face in the future will be different, and the types of adaptations will be different, and we’ll need the ability to have institutions that can rapidly adapt to whatever those things are. That’s really fundamental, particularly for technologies like robotics that are moving so rapidly. The progress in machine intelligence driven by deep learning and neural networks is just mind-blowing. These deep-learning neural networks are solving problems that have bedeviled AI researchers for decades, things that people just had no idea how to solve.

So we’re at the beginning of an explosion in machine intelligence that’s likely to unfold. It’s really hard for the U.S. to stay competitive in that environment, in part because things are moving quickly and in part because a lot of the innovation of robotics is outside of traditional defense actors. It’s coming from Google and IBM and Microsoft and Facebook and Apple, and they don’t want to work with DOD. It’s not worth the headache. I’ve heard from people in venture capital firms, I won’t let my companies work with the U.S. military, because they’re just going to bog you down into a lengthy multiyear process of futzing around with requirements. They’re going to try to over-specify what they need, they’re going to give you a bunch of government red tape. And at the end of the day, the profit margins aren’t even going to be there.

What we’re seeing is, there’s this model where DOD uses tools like
DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and the Office of Naval Research [ONR] to fund basic innovation in various technologies, and the concept is that they take this stuff to a commercial market and they mature these technologies, and then they spin back into the defense sector. That’s a great model, [but] I’m not sure how much things are actually coming back in.

Army AL&T: You mean what they call transitioning?

Scharre: Well, there’s two different kinds of concepts. One is, you have a place like DARPA develop something that’s a really appealing proof of concept. And then they throw it over the transom or use some means that’s supposed to cross the “valley of death” that people describe to get into a program of record. And that often fails. There isn’t necessarily an institution of bureaucracy that is designed to grab hold of those things and then transition them.

Army AL&T: I think the new Army Rapid Capabilities Office has that intent.

Scharre: Yeah, the Rapid Capabilities Office seems exactly like the kind of thing the Army should be doing, and it has a lot of potential. The Army needs that kind of capability from a bureaucratic standpoint. I think it remains to be seen if they’re going to have the bureaucratic clout and the funding and the autonomy to do what they need to do.

And then there’s this smaller issue, that there are some technologies that aren’t even right for transitioning yet. So DOD makes a fundamental investment, and it’s just not mature enough to be really transitioned to a military application, and the company takes it to market in the commercial side and they might mature it. And you hope that over time, that [technology] comes back in.

People are trying to create ad hoc processes to do that, and we need more of those kinds of things. It’s especially vital for technologies like robotics and automation, where they’re moving rapidly and so much of the innovation is happening out in the commercial sector.

I will say I’ve seen tremendous interest in the last several years—and not just concepts about human-machine teaming in physical ways and cognitive ways, but also people really thinking hard about, OK, what does it mean to be innovative? How do we find ways of increasing experimentation and war-gaming and competition of ideas so that we’re meeting at the forefront of new operational concepts in relation to adversaries?

Now the Army has the opportunity to take basically a cadre of leaders—junior and midgrade officers and NCOs who’ve been able to have that freedom to be innovative out in the field and have autonomy—and say, OK, we want you to take the sort of intellectual capital you had and the skill set of problem-solving and apply it to new problems: How will we fight a war against Russia? How will we project power in the Pacific? How will we respond to adversaries’ challenges in cyberspace and electronic warfare and other things?

The way those wars were fought, particularly in Afghanistan, where the geography and people are so dispersed, we gave a lot of autonomy to junior leaders, and brigades and divisions were in support of people at lower levels. That’s just incredibly good in terms of maturing our leaders in their critical thinking. One of the challenges the Army has going forward is, for people who grew up in that environment, how do you continue that in garrison? So you get the squad leader engaged in finding solutions. You can’t do those things from the headquarters.

Army AL&T: That leads us to our next question, which is what do you see as the near- and long-term strengths and weaknesses of the military in these areas of robotics, AI and advanced manufacturing?

Scharre: There’s a bit of a mythology that has arisen within DOD, and the Army in particular, about how DOD will remain competitive in an era of robotics and automation and human-machine teaming. The story is basically, well, we have better people and that’s what’s going to make a difference. And that’s true to a point. The thing to be keeping in mind is that that means there’s more room for others [potential adversaries] to catch up.

Are our people better trained? Do we recruit a better slice of the population? Are they better-educated? Yes. All those things are true. That also means that it’s harder for us to get a 10 percent improvement in people—versus in another country where the ground ahead of them, in terms of improving their people and their training, might be easier. So I think that [that] alone isn’t something you can take to the bank.

In a world of rapidly advancing technology that is widely available to all, how do you create enduring military advantage? And one of the quick conclusions that people have come to is, there’s no technology or set of technologies that’s going to be a silver bullet, which I think is absolutely true. But sitting back and resting on our laurels and saying our people are better—that’s not going to work, either.

The most compelling opportunity to create long-term advantage—what history shows us where advantage really comes from in periods of rapid technological change like this—is the process of innovation, of translating technological opportunity into new operational concepts to solve concrete operational problems. There is, particularly within the Army, a sub-current of pushback against the technology-driven sort of themes of the third offset. DOD as a whole is a very sort of technophile kind of organization, very interested in new technology. In the Army, we all look at this and are a bit skeptical: “When I was marching up and down the mountains of Afghanistan, what were all these stealth planes doing for me? And what were all these whiz-bang technology things doing to really change warfare at the ground level, down there in the mud?”

It’s been very difficult to translate technology advantage down to the squad level, down to the infantry Soldier. Part of that is because you’re limited in the amount of stuff you can give a foot-mounted Soldier. People are loaded down with insane amounts of weight they’ve been lugging around Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are ways in which that might begin to change. Could we use robotic teammates or, maybe not far off, exoskeletons to try to carry more weight or to off-load weight to robotic teammates? Possibly. I’ll point out that there are opportunities that the Army might not totally be invested in. The Army’s doing nothing on exoskeletons. That’s probably a weakness, because there are really transformative potentials here. It’s not going to be ready tomorrow, but right now the Army’s taking a wait-and-see approach to see what SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command] is doing [with the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit program]. While what SOCOM is doing is great, it’s probably not adequately funded to do technological development. They’re doing some things, but the Army would have more resources, and they have potentially different needs and different requirements.

Similarly, the Army is doing more with robotic kinds of teammates to carry load and increase situational awareness and lethality. But in general, the enduring advantage is going to come not from any of those technologies in the long term, but from the ability for people and organizations to come up with new ways of using these technologies.

Army AL&T: Can you give us an example?

Scharre: The Israelis are building unmanned vehicles to be used to evacuate their troops. The Marine Corps is developing unmanned cargo aircraft that can potentially be used to do casualty evacuation, which is great. But the Army medical community, whose job it is to do this, had said in writing on three occasions that they think that should be prohibited. And it’s not because they’re trying to do something that’s harmful to Soldiers. But they have a certain paradigm for what medical evacuation is.

There are a number of individuals in the Army medical community who would like to see that opportunity open up. There might be situations where an unmanned system is the only way to evacuate a wounded Soldier. If that is the case, then we need to have that option available.

If we’re worried about safety, what is the right standard? How should we think about that kind of thing? That’s the right approach instead of just a blanket rejection of technology.

Army AL&T: Do you think that DOD is flexible enough to look at the potential for technological breakthroughs in robotics and AI and whatnot and weigh them individually in terms of cost, in terms of risk versus benefit?

Scharre: We better be. If these technologies give important advantages on the battlefield, then we better find out a way to be flexible enough. In general, our requirements system is not super flexible and fast. We’re capable of being innovative and smart, but robotics is going to challenge some communities in ways that are going to be uncomfortable.

So we’re going to have to be able to take a hard look at ourselves and say, am I objecting to this use of robotics and automation based on concerns that really, objectively make sense? Do the costs and benefits here add up? Or am I being biased based on my perception of how we ought to do this job? Because robotics will enable us to change how we fight, and that is the most difficult thing for innovation.

Instead of saying, no, we can’t do it that way, start by saying, why not? Why not fight in a completely different way? What if, in the future, the front line is going to be unmanned, it’s going to have robotic systems, and tanks are in a supporting role, a command-and-control role? The primary method of destroying the enemy would be sending out robotic forces and long-range scouts to find the enemy and then call in the long-range fires.

There are pockets of people that are starting to think those kinds of things. It’s amazing. But there’s not enough of that. The Army’s interested in building a new light tank. It’s valuable. But is that the most valuable thing in the long run? I’m not sure that it is.

Army AL&T: So how do you think we stack up in terms of the other major powers and the lesser, more flexible, somewhat less sophisticated powers, such as insurgents?

Scharre: Russia’s invested heavily in ground robotics. They’re doing quite a bit. They’re weaponizing them. They’ve got a whole fleet of different ground robotic vehicles of various sizes, almost all of which are armed. Russia’s just going gangbusters on ground robotics. I’m not sure, from an underlying technological standpoint, that they’re more capable than the U.S. They can build good things, and they have a very capable military. But I don’t know that they’re building anything that we couldn’t do.

But they are doing things that the Army is not doing. And it’s not because of policy reasons or it’s prohibited in some way; it’s just because the Army has decided not to go there and not to push the bounds of experimentation and constant development. I think there’s more we could do in robotics.

Army AL&T: How about AI?

Scharre: A lot of the really interesting AI stuff is coming from U.S. companies like Google and Microsoft and IBM and Facebook. But it’s not happening in the defense sector. All of the really powerful AI tools are open source. They’re all publicly available. You can go to TensorFlow, an open source AI tool that Google created to download information on neural networks. So basically anybody has access to this.

We don’t really have any advantages there. We’re going to have to really race hard to stay just competitive. A lot of the best AI companies are U.S. companies, but they’re not building these things for military applications, they don’t want to build them for military applications.

Army AL&T: Do you think the Pentagon even understands the potential of this revolution in AI?

Scharre: I think people are beginning to start to ask, what is this AI thing all about? Yes, we need to wake up to that. People in the tech industry have talked about it being as big as the invention of electricity. That’s kind of a big deal, right? Sometimes I think the wrong way for people to look at this is if everyone has it, then why is that something we should stake our advantage on? We should find something else.

That’s not the point. The point is, if it’s as big as electricity, then we don’t want to miss out on it. That’s big. We’ve got to compete in that space. People are starting to wake up to the idea that an AI revolution is beginning and it will probably have really transformative effects for military, and we need to start to figure out really quickly what those are.

Army AL&T: Do you see anybody in the lead on that?

Scharre: The Israelis do really great stuff in robotics and automation in general. I think they’re ahead of us in terms of robotics—not in terms of AI necessarily, but in terms of robotics. In terms of AI, very few militaries have really begun to think about how to implement that from a military standpoint.

In our military, the Navy’s doing some incredible things in terms of experimentation. The Air Force is really starting to do some interesting stuff on low-cost swarming aerial drones, which will potentially have really interesting applications for the Army as well. If a C-130 could dump a swarm of a couple hundred drones over a city to do surveillance and detection of the enemy while we’re in the middle of an assault into a city, that could be really dramatic. Imagine the Thunder Run into Baghdad [the April 2003 U.S. armored strike] with a swarm of a thousand drones overhead.

In general, the Army is probably underinvested in ground robotics. The Army is doing things like SMET, the Squad Mission Equipment Transport program. That’s good. But there’s room to do more there. Similarly with exoskeletons, which people sort of refer to as wearable robotics.

Army AL&T: To put it in concrete terms, where do think we ought to be in, say, five years, in terms of specific aspects of readiness and technology?

Scharre: In robotics, there’s a lot of quick, easy wins that the Army could do right. I’d like to see increased funding for robotics, particularly for ground robotic systems like the SMET program. I’d like to see the Army actually rescind what I think is a very harmful policy on behalf of the medical community, prohibiting casualty evacuation [casevac] with unmanned vehicles. We should be looking into that and trying to figure out the standards that we would need for safe casualty evacuation—and then, if we’re building cargo, air or ground vehicles, trying to bake into the requirements whether they could be used for casevac. Others have suggested this approach. It’s really a no-brainer.
Army AL&T: What do you see as the pros and cons of fully autonomous weapon systems?

Scharre: There are situations where the pressures of time may unfortunately take the human out of the loop. We have four auto modes on the Patriot [air and missile defense system], for example, because there may be situations where a person is too slow and the system needs to respond [automatically]. That’s risky, it’s dangerous, right? But there are situations where maybe that’s necessary.

We’re now talking about full autonomy, about a weapon system that’s operating on its own, finding targets, destroying them on its own, and there’s no human involved. So you’ve got a robotic vehicle roaming on the battlefield, and it’s doing this according to its programming, but there’s no human to check in on it. The human can’t stop it even if it starts to malfunction.

From a purely military standpoint, it might be advantageous to send a robotic vehicle into a communications-denied environment to do this. It’s probably not a good idea because the risk is really high. We’re talking about a very lethal system that is operating in an environment that you can’t see. It’s not obviously illegal under the laws of war, but it’s also not illegal to make a hand grenade with a half-second fuze—it’s just stupid, because it’s going to blow up in your face.

Army AL&T: You’ve written about robots and swarming in mass numbers, and I wonder what you think about the potential for it.

Scharre: There are a couple of different issues here. One is that when we say swarming, we really mean cooperative autonomy. So it doesn’t sound as exciting—swarming sounds super exciting. But basically it’s the ability to task a group of autonomous agents to go out and conduct a mission or a task and to do so collectively, working together as a group. So today we have all these unmanned or uninhabited or remotely piloted systems, or whatever you want to call them. But they’re basically remote control.

Some of the more advanced ones are pretty automated, like a Global Hawk. The pilot’s not flying a Global Hawk with a stick and rudder, the pilot is directing the Global Hawk where to go with a keyboard and a mouse, and the airplane flies itself. But the paradigm is still one pilot to one aircraft. And we’re always going to be limited in how we can really take hold of the robotics revolution under that paradigm. Because we’re always going to be limited in personnel.

In the U.S. military, people are costly. And if we can begin to break that paradigm with a one-to-many approach, where one person can task a group or a team or a swarm of autonomous vehicles that go on a connected mission together, that’s really where you begin to see the payoff in terms of cost [and] operational effectiveness. I can trim my personnel or I can reallocate personnel to other things.

The Army and Marine Corps are looking at uninhabited ground vehicles for logistics and resupply for convoys. And you’ll probably have the same amount of logistics and resupply, but now maybe I can trim the number of people I need and then I reallocate those people somewhere else in the force where I have shortages. That’s really what automation is about. It’s about limiting certain kinds of tasks.

So the essence of swarming is maybe I can put more low-cost distributed sensors on the battlefield. If I don’t have to put a person in a vehicle, can I make the vehicle smaller, cheaper? Can I make it more expendable? Maybe less survivable? That’s a really appealing paradigm for DOD. We’ve been fighting this multi-decade trend in rising platform costs for ships, aircraft, ground vehicles, you name it—any major platform.

We’re facing that and lean budget times. The costs keep going up. There are just limits to what we can do when we have this sort of vicious cycle of fewer platforms, so the ones we have need to be more capable, more multimission. They’re more valuable, they have to be more survivable, which means there have to be fewer of them. So that’s a tough challenge. Look at, say, Army ground combat, where you can put on large numbers of low-cost sensors and they could be static, unattended ground sensors that are air-dropped or launched from artillery and then lie in wait. They hibernate and they listen to the enemy or various types of signatures about enemy movement or dissension, various types of modes of intelligence, and record it back.

Or it could be mobile sensors that are airborne or on the ground, drones or ground robotics. But they’re cheap and they’re expendable. That’s a whole new way to think about mass and warfare that the U.S. military really just hasn’t thought about in decades. I mean, our whole paradigm for the last 70 years—during the Cold War and since then—has been quality over quantity, right?

That’s not the only way to fight. We’re probably not going to make an Abrams [M1 tank] expendable. But could we make cheap robot scouts for the Abrams that help identify the enemy and are made expendable? Maybe we could.

Army AL&T: Is there any service or any private industry or country that you think is technologically ahead in this area of optionally manned devices or vehicles?

Scharre: A lot of companies do neat things on applique kits, whether it’s for airplanes or helicopters or ground vehicles, where you can take the sensors and the brains and you can slap them onto almost anything. Now you can build out the autonomy, and then you can retrofit it to whatever in potentially existing platforms.

We’ve got thousands of Humvees and M113s [armored personnel carriers] in the U.S. Army’s inventory that aren’t going to be survivable enough to put people in in a future conflict, but they would be survivable enough for a robot. And if we could make low-cost applique kits to put on those, you could fuel at low cost a robot army of scouts. They don’t have to be particularly intelligent; in fact, ideally you have robust communications with them and they’re sending back streams of data. You can put weapons on them, and you could call for fire with them and do other things.

Army AL&T: In the latest “Star Trek” movie, the Enterprise’s nemesis had a swarming capability launching an array of networked, apparently smart projectiles that ripped to shreds anything in their path. Could you see one fighter jet team with a swarm of much less costly unmanned jets or optionally manned jets being more effective in aerial combat than manned jets?

Scharre: It’s possible. We just don’t know. Swarming is very appealing because there are a couple of different paradigms. One could be that they’re very capable, high-speed, very lethal, survivable assets, but you network them and they’re communicating. They’re working together to time their attack to overwhelm the defensive position at the same time.

One of the key concepts here is that just having a bunch of stuff is not a swarm. That’s just a deluge of things. Swarming is about cooperative behavior. It’s about elements that are able to work together to a common purpose. We’re not quite there yet in terms of our munitions. I think one of the real advantages going forward is to take existing munitions—it might be the same missile with just a block upgrade, adding in-flight networking with human controllers so you can give in-flight targeting updates, but also adding in-flight targeting among the munitions themselves so they can communicate on targets. There are many different ways to communicate.

Look at nature. When you look at wolves, they have complex intrapack communication, but not when they’re on the attack. When they’re on the attack, there’s a signal to attack by the pack leader and then they attack. And then a lot of what they’re doing is based on implicit communication. Wolves are watching others behave.

And then you have even simpler agents like ants and bees and termites that use even simpler forms of communication. Termites and ants communicate by leaving signals. And then another agent comes along and sees a clue, a tag in the environment that someone left and then reacts. So you can imagine, for example, you’re doing sea mining operations this way, where robots go around and they just tag things, and then others respond to those tags and cues.

Army AL&T: How could you see this working in urban areas, for instance?

Scharre: Let’s say you want to go into a house. Right now people storm into the house, right? Maybe you throw a flash-bang in, and then we run in and hope that nobody shoots you. It’s super dangerous and people get killed. Well, the technology basically exists today to have a swarm of maybe five, 10, 15, 20 drones go into a house, map out the house that they’ve never been into before, all of the rooms without GPS, using visual-aided navigation and line art to map the environment, to sense objects using things like neural network-based object detection to look for specific individuals, look for AK-47s. Tell me where they are. And have them look together so that they map different rooms, to optimize coverage.

And then once you’ve mapped the environment, now you can send people in. Let’s have a robot get shot, not a person.

Army AL&T: Any grand wish for the Army as to where it should be in five years?

Scharre: No, I just think there are a lot of opportunities, and I think that we want to make sure that we’re capitalizing on them as best we can.

I remember very clearly a moment for me when it was clear that robotics was potentially valuable. We were in Diyala province [in eastern Iraq] in 2007-2008 during a surge, and had stopped the convoy and were waiting on the engineers to come to defuse an IED. And a number of them show up in a big MRAP. I’m waiting for the engineer to come out in a bomb suit and go defuse the bomb, and instead a full robot rolls out, and it was like a light bulb went off. I said, “Oh, yeah, send the robots to do the dangerous jobs.”

And that really stuck with me. However, others have access to those opportunities as well. If the U.S. has a lead in robotics, it’s a fragile one, and we don’t want to fall behind.


MS. MARGARET C. ROTH is an editor of Army AL&T magazine. She has more than a decade of experience in writing about the Army and more than three decades’ experience in journalism and public relations. Roth is a Maj. Gen. Keith L. Ware Public Affairs Award winner and a co-author of the book “Operation Just Cause: The Storming of Panama.” She holds a B.A. in Russian language and linguistics from the University of Virginia.

Story was originally published on page 88 of the April - June 2017 issue of Army AL&T. It may also be found at http://usaasc.armyalt.com/?iid=151974#folio=90.

• Date Taken: 04.01.2017
• Date Posted: 02.12.2018 07:53
• Story ID: 265608
• Location: US