Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Opinion I've read military science fiction since I was a kid. Besides the likes of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books, where people held the lead roles, I read novels such as Keith Laumer's Bolo series and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker space opera sf series, where machines are the protagonists and enemies. Even if you've never read war science fiction, you certainly at least know about Terminators. But what was once science fiction is now reality on the Ukrainian battlefields. It won't stop there.
You see, war always accelerates technology's advances. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine first took drone technology from expensive gear to cheaply made drones that are literally made from cardboard. As the battles continued, both Russia and Ukraine have countered each other's drones by interfering with GPS and jamming the wireless bandwidth used to control the drones.
As a result, both sides have taken to using fiber optic drones, which are unjammable. They're not perfect. You can follow the fiber optic cable back to their controllers, their range is limited to about 20 kilometers, and they are being countered by nets being put up around roads and important sites.
So Ukraine has been working hard on the next logical step of drone warfare: AI-driven drones. It is far from the first. If you try to cross the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), you might be stopped by a South Korean SGR-A1 sentry robot, which is armed with a K-3 machine gun and 40mm automatic grenade launcher. These static robots have been deployed since 2010.
Israel has also been pushing forward with a variety of AI-driven war machines such as the Harpy and Harop, loitering munitions; and the six-wheeled RoBattle. The US has also been retrofitting its MQ-9 Reaper and XQ-58 Valkyrie drones with AI, while the experimental Longshot comes with AI built-in. And, sorry Top Gun fans, but Maverick won't be able to beat VENOM AI-equipped F16s fighter planes when they're finally deployed.
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