In war these days there are few fates worse than that of the sapper who turns out chosen to advance, loaded with a 50 kilo backpack of explosive hoseto throw it at a strong point, a wire fence or a mine barrier that prevents the advance of your unit. As he approaches, a rain of bullets awaits that sapper from those who will try by all means to prevent him from reaching his objective.
That mission, which the military calls “opening a gap” is one of the worst opportunities on the front. The boss who appoints a pair of sappers to open the breach knows the seriousness of his choice, just as his subordinates know the risk: on a war front, between the 70 and 80% of those sent for that mission do not return alive to their positions.
This tremendous percentage of lethality, and the consequent effort to reduce the loss of human casualties on that flank, make up one of the lessons that come to the Army from Ukraine.
Lesson 1: Drones save lives
A square, compact vehicle, with four small knobby wheels, looking like a toy truck, waits on the arid scree of Cabo de Gata for the arrival of the group of generals and international guests who have been called to see it operate. On his back he carries two open backpacks, each with a thread of explosive hose. and, at the top, a rocket about to jump that will pull the cord.
Legionnaire Francisco Navarro observes the UGV Adriano that will carry an explosive cord to a mine barrier. / José Luis Roca
It is the machine that the legionnaires from the Viator base (Almería) to open gaps. The test plans to save casualties: instead of having a couple of soldiers go to try to blow up the enemy defense, let the robust robot car go at good speed, guided by another drone, this flying one, which acts as eyes on the ground.
Located on the edge of the minefield, in a real situation it would be receiving heavy fire from the enemy. Without wasting time,The robot, a UGV, launches the rocket with a bang, which pulls the explosive cord and stretches it into the airfalls as far as it is with its penthrite balls and explodes on the ground. It is assumed that the explosion, by sympathy, by vibrations, by a shock wave, detonates the nearest mines, opening a safe corridor for the infantry that will come after.
The creators of the machine, the Spanish firm Alisys, call it a “multipurpose ground robot for critical missions,” but they prefer to call it Hadrian, which, in addition to being the name of a Roman emperor, is also an approximate acronym for Autonomous Deployable Robot for Intelligence, Intervention, Assistance & Logistics in Networked Operations.
A legionnaire receives in his hand the landing of an observation quadcopter in the Strategic Experimentation Campaign that takes place at the Viator base (Almería). / José Luis Roca
Drones and technical words run these days across the old volcanic plain of Viator, handled and spoken by the Legion. These are the days of the third CET, or Tactical Experimentation Campaign. The Legion is the body chosen for the main Force 35 experimentsthe set of works that the Army has been doing for years to conceive what it could be like in the near future. Promotes testing, in the Plans Division, the Future Force Center.
The legionnaire Francisco Navarroa 29-year-old from Murcia, kneels next to the vehicle to check its load. He manipulates the machinery gently, as if he were petting a ram. “I like it because it is very easy to handle,” he says. Both he and his teammates are young of a generation that has grown up handling joysticks and controllers of video game consoles. Now it’s similar, only it’s real life what they see on the screens.
“All this, so much machine and screen, dehumanizes,” says Navarro, with the tassel of his legionary cap swinging in the gusty wind that comes from the sea, “but it also humanizes.” And he explains: “I would prefer a thousand times that a robot go to open a gap than that two companions who will surely fall have to go.”
A drone chases another in the sky over Almería during the Legion’s tests for the Army’s Force 35 concept. / José Luis Roca
The Ukrainian army, plagued by a lack of personnel, is trying to reduce casualties and manages to effectively oppose a front line of robots to Russia air and land that do the attack and defense. NATO takes note. It is a consensus among war observers that 70% of casualties – not just sappers – are no longer caused by artillery, as it has been for more than a century, but by drones.
But the robots that operate in war have two faces: they also serve to save coffins for the owner side. “I like this UGV because it is comfortable, it lasts 10 hours, can even be controlled with your mobile -says the legionnaire-, and if they destroy it, well look: it is much cheaper than a life.
Lesson 2: The union of robots is strength
The Legion acts as a test pilot for ground combat machines, giant armored 8X8 Dragoncombinations of autonomous towers and radars that see the drone approaching in flight and shoot it with robotic precision. On the back of a six-wheeled armored vehicle, a self-contained 30 mm cannon points its nose to the sky, rotating in silent search for a target. Below, an engineer from Escribano M&E and a group of his colleagues from Indra observe the system they have created, equipped with optronic eyes made from disputed rare earths. “It’s a race,” says the scientist. “The drone tries to get there faster, to hit it before it is shot down, and we try to detect it and hit it further away.”
There is Darwinism in technological war that runs parallel to the military war. Many novelties that the Legion has already tried have been nullified by others that have emerged months later, in the evolution of the Ukrainian battlefield.
A group of senior Army officers in front of an autonomous tower anti-drone system with Escribano and Indra radars. / José Luis Roca
The legionnaires have installed a semi-hidden command post in the valley of a dry riverbed in the Almeria desert. A strange perforated fabric helps to cover the office containers, providing shade to the soldiers who work underneath; not only sun shade, also electronic: absorbs almost all the magnetic fingerprint emitted by antennas and computers of the position.
Below, the Lieutenant Colonel Martinfrom the Research and Analysis Section of the Doctrine Command of the Army, speaks: “The battlefield today is transparent. Everything that is there can be seen, can be detected and can be defeated with a kinetic action (a shot, a blow, an explosion) or a non-kinetic action (an electronic disturbance)”…
Since everything can be detected, the engineers at JCISAT (Cyberspace Headquarters) have moderated the power of an antenna from the Spanish SME Atika with which they have created a 5G cloud about 300 meters radius for the command center.
A legionnaire points an anti-drone electronic shotgun at the sky. / José Luis Roca
At the moment, the independent communications and data cloud is an unbeatable technology, but there are already, surely, engineers thinking about how to break its encryption and mess it up. To avoid this, in this command center in the Almeria wadi we work with an artificial intelligence. The military does not give more details, only that it is one hundred percent Spanish…and from another SME.
To a question from this newspaper, the Colonel Alberto Quero, of the Plans Division of the Army General Staffemphasizes: “We learned many lessons from the war in Ukraine, including that what we learned six months ago may already be over.” For him, the main new lesson is that “it is no longer feasible to operate with a single type of robot. The solution is to integrate different robotic systems in a single operation.”
Lesson 3: Cheap wins over expensive
Four years of war have put each army and each technology in its place. And it is up to non-combatants to learn from the inexorabilities of the front. Among them, that There is a way to wear down the enemy if, with cheap weapons, he is forced to waste expensive defenses. The Future Force, if it wants to survive, must take into account this asymmetry, which has been seen every night in Ukraine in the Russian saturation attacks.
The Army’s Tactical Drone Experimentation Campaign is carried out at the Legion’s base in Almeria / José Luis Roca
Part of the innovations that about thirty companies and university centers have brought to Viator are part of the axis: being more effective while cheaper. There is no mention in tactical experimentation of million-dollar Patriot batteriesbut of micro-sized drones that fight against other similar drones, small robots that today represent a problem to which solutions are only seen in Spain and Ukraine. Without laser beams, without expensive missiles, just by being faster and more resistant, fly and hit the opponent to make them fall or burst before it harms the troops.
On the First Line of the demonstration, the firm Arquimea has mounted a discreet, barely detectable launcher, which with compressed air puts it into the air a rectangular polyhedron that immediately spreads wings and becomes a flying drone in search of its prey. Other firms present also launch their robots to attack other robots like hawks.
“This field of experimentation is a valuable tool for us,” says Colonel Quero. “We try to get ahead of what combat will be like in the futureto be prepared. We really can’t know what combat will be like in 2030 or 2045; What we do know is that we need a great capacity to adapt, because what comes will be unknown.”
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