Marines adopt robotic warfare model

 USNI News:

Marines are looking to push as many tasks as possible to autonomous systems as the service aims to operate across wide swaths of the Pacific.

The Marines are working on several avenues to add autonomy to the service, Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, Marine Corps deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told the audience at the Defense News conference Wednesday.

“If you take the [person] out of it, things get simpler and they typically get more efficient, and they get less expensive,” he said.
“You should try to go after everything.”

An example is the under-development low-profile autonomous ships the Marines are considering for contested resupply. The idea came from America’s ongoing counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, Heckl said.

“We just copied the drug lords out of South America,” he said.

Heckl singled out the recent test transit of the autonomous Spearhead-class highspeed transport USNS Apalachicola (T-EPF-13) that was fitted with a $44 million Congressionally mandated autonomy package.

“It went out and did like 1500 nautical miles, completely autonomously. …They had human beings on board as backups to watch, but what an amazing capability,” Heckl said.
“So, I think autonomous from a logistics perspective? Absolutely.”

In terms of aviation, existing fly by wire systems on modern aircraft make it much easier to make aircraft optionally manned.

“All platforms in my opinion, aviation and otherwise should be optionally unmanned… particularly from an aviation perspective. No longer you need oxygen. This doesn’t make sense. You don’t have to worry about bathroom breaks,” he said.
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Whether these machines can fix themselves are adapt quickly to threats will be interesting.  I tend to think that having a thinking warfighter at the helm can still make a positive difference.  One of the things the autonomous systems probably can do by not having humans on board is be able to make maneuvers that would otherwise be impossible.