Russia triggered robot warfare and created a monster in Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has created a monster — and it may destroy him.As President Volodymyr Zelensky has made plain, Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine has brought on the age of war robots.“For the first time in this war’s history, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms and drones,” Zelensky told defense industry workers last week.“The occupiers surrendered, and this operation was completed without infantry involvement and without losses on our side.”For the last four years, Russia’s big advantage in this war has been manpower.It’s been able to flood the zone with troops in numbers Ukraine has struggled to match.By replacing flesh-and-blood soldiers with mechanical recruits, Kyiv is negating that advantage.It’s also opening the door to a nightmarish new type of warfare in which machines hunt down and exterminate humans.Remote-control combat vehicles date back, ironically enough, to the “Teletanks” developed by the Soviet Union in the 1930s.These were obsolete light tanks armed with flamethrowers to assault defended positions.But they were difficult to control via unreliable radio connections, and the idea was soon dropped.By the 1970s, small remote-controlled vehicles found a military niche in bomb disposal, but efforts to add weapons to these robots were unsuccessful.And while the US deployed armed SWORDS/Talon robots to Iraq in 2007, they were never used in action, apparently due to concerns over reliability and the potential for bad publicity. The Russians did use Uran-9, a small robotic tank, in Syria, but the results were uneven; it suffered communication problems that left the vehicle stranded, and it has not been seen in Ukraine.Navigation on the ground is more challenging than flying — which is why aerial drones are common but ground vehicles, from self-driving cars to sidewalk delivery robots, are still a novelty.They easily get confused or stuck: In January, a delivery robot got caught on train tracks in Miami...