In the pursuit of technologies like autonomous robotics and tactical electronic warfare that will change the fundamental character of combat, the Army should be on the front lines, its most senior civilian and uniformed officer told lawmakers on Thursday.
“We need to lead from the front. We’re talking about leap-ahead technologies,” acting Army Secretary Patrick Murphy said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on April 7. “Our peer competitors are investing in those things, too,” Murphy said. “We can’t be outmanned and outgunned. We need to make sure that we have the technical and tactical advantage.”
The second offset was marked by the use of precision munitions, global positioning and night vision systems that the military developed at great cost during the 1980s and employed to great effect in the 1990s and 2000s, Murphy said. The third offset will be marked by robotics, cyber and dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum that likely will play a major role in combat on the ground, in the air, at sea, in space and cyberspace beyond 2025.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said unmanned ground system in particular will be a ubiquitous element of future warfare and thus worthy of near-term research and development dollars.
“I think revolution might be too strong a word, but 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. “We’re already seeing it in air platforms and we’re seeing it in naval platforms. Ground warfare is a much more complex environment, dirty environment. I do anticipate that we are going to refine the use of robots significantly and there will be a large use of them in ground combat by, call it 2030.”
Milley also mentioned electromagnetic rail guns and information technology, miniaturization and 3D printing as emerging commercial technologies that will have a profound impact on the character of warfare beyond 2030.
“We, the Army…need to invest in the R+D and the modernization of that or we are going to find a qualitative overmatch gap between the United States and adversaries closed,” he said. “We are already seeing that gap closing today.”
The Army has long understood that lasers and directed energy technologies could have various future applications as unmanned aerial systems countermeasures, missile defense and anti-personnel devices. Milley said Army research funding is better spent elsewhere because the Navy and Air Force are heavily investing in directed energy programs on which the Army can piggyback.
We are putting money into directed energy…but in terms of scale and proportion, it is less than some other areas,” Milley said. “One of the reasons is because some of our sister services…are doing a lot on directed energy. We don’t want to duplicate their work. We want to let them pump their money into it, see what comes out of it in terms of directed energy weapons and then we’ll modify that research for applications to ground warfare.”