Patrick Tucker of DefenseOne reports that first-person drone piloting is yesterday’s news. Drones are becoming smarter as the electronic environment around them makes operator communication more difficult. Tucker writes:
Small drones have been changing modern warfare at least since 2015, when Russia and Ukraine began to use them to great effect for rapid targeting. The latest addition is a strike-and-intelligence quadcopter that its builder hopes will do more things with a lot less operator attention.
The point of the Bolt-M, revealed by Anduril today, is to make fewer demands on the operator and offer more information than, easy-to-produce first-person-view strike drones, the type that Ukraine is producing by the hundreds of thousands. The U.S. Army, too, is looking at FPV drones for infantry platoons. But they require special training to use and come with a lot of operational limits. The Bolt-M, according to an Anduril statement, works “without requiring specialized operators.” The company has a contract from the U.S. Marine Corps’ Organic Precision Fires – Light, or OPF-L, program to develop a strike variant.
Bolt-M’s key selling feature is its autonomy-and-AI software powered by Anduril’s Lattice platform. […]
Over the next six months, the Marine Corps will put the Bolt-M’s munition variant through “a pretty rigorous test and evaluation campaign,” he said.
The Bolt-M pushes right up to the limits of the Pentagon principle that robotic weapons should always have a person involved in lethal decisions. […]
One of the key lessons from Ukraine’s battlefield is that battlefield conditions can move very rapidly. Different nations, allied and adversary, will have different policies around lethal autonomy. Those other policies will change rapidly, too, depending on what’s happening on the front lines. As attacks against the connections binding humans to drones become more effective, the need for more capable autonomy will increase.
Brose said Anduril anticipates that U.S. policy will change, and they want to be ready to serve the Pentagon’s new needs when it happens.
Read more here.
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