Much has been made of how “the tank is dead,” Matthew Dooley, defense strategic initiatives lead at autonomy company Forterra, said during a presentation at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Future Force Capabilities Conference and Exhibition. However, “until we come up with some other technical solution that’s able to destroy the enemy by means of maneuver, firepower and shock effect in a protected fashion and retain terrain,” you will continue to see tanks on the battlefield, said Dooley, a former armored cavalry officer in the Army.

Attacking tanks with armed aerial drones is one approach, but whether it’s their armor, an active protection system or other counter-UAS capabilities, there are a number of ways to make it “hard for a UAV to do what it needs to do, regardless of the size of the payload it’s carrying,” he said. Currently, it takes between 10 to 22 first-person view drones to take out one tank, he added. A tank is weakest if you can get something in close enough proximity “where it can’t see something on the ground,” Dooley said — not a large ground robot, but “something in the size of a professional RC car.” Companies are already exploring such a solution, he said. For example, something the size of Swarmbotics AI’s approximately 70-pound FireAnt unmanned ground vehicle would be “big enough to get over terrain but small enough to get underneath the suppressive fire capability of either the coaxial machine gun in the turret or the commander’s machine gun up top.” Operating small armed ground robots in concert with aerial drones “creates multiple dilemmas” for an adversary, Dooley said.

“The only thing I feared as a tanker is the idea of a [Family of Scatterable Mines] minefield: something suddenly deployed in front of me from a family of deployable … munitions where there wasn’t a minefield before,” he said. “The only thing I think scarier than that is the idea of a mobile minefield.” A group of ground robots “that has the capability to destroy me like a mine from underneath where I’m most vulnerable, but it moves to where I am. And if I don’t go that way, it can relocate again and relocate again, deny terrain and deny me the flexibility of being able to be dismissive about a minefield, because that suite of solutions coming at me has the ability to follow me and compensate for tactical decisions I make — that’s the idea,” he said.

The Army is currently developing a requirement for a family of consumable combat robots that have a range of 120 kilometers, can reach a top speed of 60 kilometers per hour and a large variant of which that can carry up to 50 kilograms of explosives, according to Dooley. “Whether or not that’s technologically achievable or not remains for us to determine, but clearly the U.S. military is looking at what’s happened in Ukraine,” where “the Russians have lost anywhere between 4,000 to 12,000 tanks, and probably five times that number of other armored fighting vehicles and wheeled vehicles,” he said. The one challenge with the “mobile minefield” concept is that such small ground robots lack the ability to get to the battlefield themselves, Dooley said. “UAVs can fly; UGVs have to be moved into a position where they can strike.”

One solution is to have larger unmanned ground vehicles carry the small robots into position, like an aircraft carrier carrying airplanes, he said. Forterra is working on autonomy solutions for larger platforms, Dooley noted — most recently collaborating with BAE Systems to prototype an autonomous Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle.

we’re gonna get vulture bikes too?!

If you can get the smaller robots to the frontlines, they offer a reconfigurable solution that can do not only anti-tank but also anti-vehicle and anti-personnel missions, and one that “gives you the ability to scale cheaply,” he said. “These things, even if they’re made in the United States from parts made in Taiwan configured together, are no more than about $500 to $800 depending on the size and the capability,” he said. “Strip off all the toy mechanisms, and you’ve got a fairly robust chassis that has a global supply chain, achievable scale, and we’ve already got … the availability of commercial-produced, military-grade explosives that at scale and reasonable cost could be used as a payload for this solution,” he said.