Robots on the Battlefield: Armed and Rescue Systems

When military robots come up in conversation, the image is usually an armed machine advancing on its own. The reality is more prosaic and more varied: the vast majority of deployed ground robots are teleoperated, used to transport supplies, disarm explosives, evacuate casualties or provide surveillance. Their value lies in replacing a human being for the most dangerous task, not in deciding on their behalf.

The first generation: bomb disposal

The military ground robot was born out of the fight against explosive devices. Britain's Wheelbarrow, used in Northern Ireland since 1972, and the American Talon or iRobot's PackBot, deployed by the thousand in Iraq and Afghanistan, share the same concept: a small tracked vehicle with a manipulator arm and cameras, controlled by cable or radio from a safe distance. Its contribution was not tactical but a matter of survival — every intervention resolved by a robot is one that a bomb-disposal technician did not have to carry out.

Armed unmanned ground vehicles

The move to armed platforms is older than is often remembered — the American SWORDS system, a Talon fitted with a machine gun, was sent to Iraq in 2007 and withdrawn without ever being used in combat — but it has gained momentum with medium-vehicle programmes. Estonia and its European partners are developing Milrem's THeMIS, used both in logistics configuration and fitted with weapon stations; Russia deployed the Uran-9 in Syria and subsequently published internal assessments critical of its data-link reliability and firing stability; the United States maintains its Robotic Combat Vehicle programme through successive prototyping phases.

The pattern that recurs across published assessments is that the hard part is not arming the vehicle but the data link, cross-country mobility, and the operator's situational awareness, who sees the world through a single camera and loses depth, sound and context.

Ukraine: the leap from theory to mass use

The war in Ukraine has turned the unmanned ground vehicle into everyday equipment, chiefly for logistics and evacuation roles. Since 2024 there has been extensive documentation of resupply missions to forward positions and casualty-evacuation runs using small, often domestically manufactured, low-cost ground platforms, in stretches where manned vehicle movement has become lethal due to drone saturation.

Both sides have also used explosive-laden ground platforms against fortified positions, and Ukraine claimed in 2024 to have carried out local assaults supported primarily by unmanned ground and aerial assets. The scale remains modest compared with aerial drones, and the same limitations — data links, terrain and endurance — continue to be the decisive factor.

Rescue and evacuation robots

The least discussed branch, and probably the one with the greatest humanitarian impact, is evacuation. The survival window for a severely wounded casualty is measured in tens of minutes, and on a front saturated with surveillance drones, a manned evacuation may be impossible for hours. Tracked platforms fitted with a stretcher, some derived from logistics mules, allow a casualty to be extracted without exposing a medical team. The United States explored the idea in the 2000s with the BEAR prototype, which never entered service; Ukraine's operational necessity has done more for the practical development of such systems than two decades of programmes.

This family also includes rubble-search robots used after bombardments and earthquakes, a field with its own civilian development track in which armed forces are more a customer than a driver.

The line of human control

The legal and political debate centres on lethal autonomous weapons systems. Since 2014, the group of governmental experts under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, in Geneva, has discussed regulation without reaching a binding instrument; the UN General Assembly adopted resolutions in 2023 and 2024 calling for the issue to be addressed urgently. The ICRC has proposed banning unpredictable systems and those that target people directly, and requiring meaningful human control over the rest.

It is worth being precise here: autonomy is not a switch but a continuum. A system may navigate on its own without firing on its own; it may recognise a type of vehicle without deciding to attack it. The platforms deployed and documented to date keep the decision to open fire in the hands of an operator, although growing communications jamming is pushing in the opposite direction.

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