The Army’s “major effort” to experiment with human-machine integration (HMI) in its units is underway, a lead official detailed on Wednesday, with the service currently testing with two platoon formations.
Gen. Jim Rainey, head of Army Futures Command (AFC), told reporters the Army is planning to conduct an HMI demonstration at its Project Convergence capstone event this coming spring and aims to have full prototype HMI platoons in place by early 2025 for further experimentation.
“This is happening. It’s going to happen. It’s going to scale. [We’re] not replacing humans with robots, but [we’re looking at] what is the optimal combination of the two],” Rainey said during an Association of the United States Army discussion.
Rainey confirmed the Army is currently working with light HMI platoon formation at Fort Moore in Georgia and a heavy formation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California, with an aim to inform scaling of experimentation efforts within brigade combat teams.
“My frustrating coming into AFC [was that] we’ve been screwing around with robots for a long time and it’s not translating into anything,” Rainey said. “If you take robots and try to replace humans or combat vehicles, you’re on a vision quest and it’s going to take a long time. If you take humans and robots and put them together in a coherent formation, you start solving all the problems in both directions. So that’s what we’re doing.”
Rainey said that Futures Command’s role leading HMI efforts can help provide the Army with a more informed, realistic picture of optimizing human and robotic system integration while taking full advantage of industry’s latest advancements in unmanned systems.
“The basic idea behind human-machine integration formations is that our quest for what’s aspirational is absolutely blinding us to what’s doable. Right? We may someday have a robot tank that can go 70 kilometers an hour in six feet of mud, maybe. But that ain’t happening anytime soon,” Rainey said. “So that was holding us back. But if you look at industry, if you look at the world, if you look at what’s in the realm of the possible, absolutely, right now, we have the ability, and I think the moral responsibility, to not trade blood for first contact with the enemy anymore and with today’s available technology.
A recent training event with the HMI light formation focused on an urban fight scenario, which Rainey said included 20 soldiers, four vehicles and a “combination of robots and configured payloads.”
They were able to close that open area. The first thing into the city was robots, robots with smoke generators, robots with tethered UAS, jamming, extending the network, UAVs coming in and dropping robotic cameras onto the tops of buildings, UAVs that can fly into a building kind of like a Roomba…that can transmit back a blueprint of that building, robot dogs with cameras. No human was the first person to enter any building,” Rainey said.
As the Army pursues robotic platform programs, such as the Robotic Combat Vehicle, Rainey reiterated his view that he doesn’t foresee autonomous and unmanned systems replacing the role of human decision makers.
“It’s going to optimize our humans to do the things that only they can do,” Rainey said. “Robots are never going to practice the art of command. They are never going to make values-based decisions the way we expect our commanders to do in combat. They don’t have instincts. They aren’t curious. So [it’s about] optimizing our humans to fight and command and lead and offloading other things. But as soon as you put the two together, [there’s] unlimited potential.”