Ground Warfare in 2050: How It Might Look - Battlefield of the Future with Advanced Military Technologies, Cyber-Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA), Robots, Aerial Platforms and Artificial Intelligence

This interesting report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. It offers a brief technological forecast of selected military technologies and their employment in ground warfare in the year 2050. This document is a think piece presenting the author's opinions, intended for stimulating discussion and ongoing exploration of future directions in military technology. This Technical Note revisits ideas developed in the earlier U.S. Army Research Laboratory report of 2015 Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050. It also elaborates on the context of several publications in which the author investigated possible features and capabilities of future autonomous intelligent agents and robots operating on the battlefield of the future.

This compilation includes a reproduction of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

While most ground vehicles will continue to use the proven wheeled and tracked locomotion, a growing fraction of vehicles, especially the ground robots intended for operations in highly cluttered, broken terrain such as urban rubble and forests, will use legged locomotion. The advances of legged locomotion in the last decade have been remarkable11 and are likely to continue so; by 2050 it will be a fully proven, robust technology. Similarly, a growing fraction of ground robots will be equipped with limbs for climbing over (pulling themselves over) boulders, piles of fallen trees, urban rubble, and such. Advances in combining such capabilities to interact with the world much as humans do with the legged mobility advantages mentioned previously, along with the AI paradigms to efficiently control these behaviors, are likely to be made in parallel. The confluence of these capabilities will enable the robotics/autonomous mobile platforms required to compete with a near-peer adversary of the future in hybrid rural/urban environments.

Aerial platforms, both robotic and manned, will rely primarily on various forms of tilt-rotor technology, which is currently at its relatively early stages of full acceptance, and will be a mature technology in 2050. Nap-of-the-earth (NOE) flight, very close to the ground, will be widely used to minimize detection and targeting by the adversary, and because autonomous AI pilots will become more effective in such flight than humans. Furthermore, autonomy will be critical to enabling vertical lift platforms such as tilt-rotors that will need to be in a state of near continuous operational availability over multiple days in order to survive near-peer long-range precision fire capabilities.