Once again, Russia has announced its latest Wunderwaffe is coming to Ukraine, which ZeroHedge treats seriously, because ZeroHedge.
Western media outlets flooded the airways with hope for Ukraine this week as the US prepares to send 31 main battle tanks to the wartorn country in Eastern Europe to counter Russian aggression ahead of spring. What wasn’t highly publicized is that these M1 Abrams are a modified version and will be stripped of “secret” uranium armor.
Following the news of NATO-made tanks set to flood Ukraine, the former head of Russia’s space agency Dmitry Rogozin told the Russian newspaper Pravda that “Marker,” a new robo-tank, will be able to ‘destroy Western tanks, including American Abrams and German Leopards.’
Rogozin explained the robot tank automatically recognizes and attacks Ukrainian equipment, including NATO tanks, all because of its artificial intelligence system and machine learning technology.
“The combat version of the Marker robot has an electronic catalog in the control system that contains images of targets both in the visible and in the infrared range,” he said.
The director of the Air Defense Museum, retired colonel Yuri Knutov, told Lenta.Ru, a Russian newspaper, “the robot can thus identify NATO-made tanks” and will be “armed with a machine gun and an anti-tank missile with a range of up to about six kilometers.”
Honestly, all of this is pretty hilarious stuff.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are real disciplines, and Russia doesn’t entirely lack technological and programming talent. It’s entirely possible that you could develop and effective autonomous battle-tank driven by AI that can adequately detect between friend and foe given lots of money, lots of time, honest, hands-off project management, and sophisticated, iterative, trial-and-error proving over a decade or more of time.
All things Russia isn’t going to have or do. If they could adequately identify friend from foe on the battlefield (especially given how much kit Ukraine shares with Russia), then they’d already be using such technology to prevent the numerous, documented friendly fire instances Russia has suffered from. And training AI to do that is something like six orders of magnitude harder than training troops to do it.
And we all know Russia sucks at training its own troops as well.
Russia’s military is so demonstrably backwards that they can’t even have their army and air force communicate with each other in real time for combined arms operations. And yet we’re supposed to believe that they’ve developed cutting edge autonomous battlefield AI?
Pull the other one.
Russia has a long history of vaporware, and Russia’s previous attempt at field trials for a semi-autonomous AFV in Syria was a hilarious disaster. And it was plagued by bog-standard mechanical failures. Autonomous driving is a whole lot harder.
There’s a small possibility that they’ll get this thing into the field and immediately start blowing away its own troops, but a far more likely outcome is that it never sees the field at all, just the latest case of Russian Wunderwaffe vaporware.
Tags: artificial intelligence, Dmitry Rogozin, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, tanks, technology, Ukraine, vaporware, Zero Hedge
Finally, somebody’s going to field the Bolo Mk I?
My prediction? Won’t be the “Bolo Mk I”, it’ll likely be the mechanical version of the Soviet trained tank attack dogs that wound up homing in on the Soviet tanks they’d been trained to go underneath…
Whatever it is, I’ll lay long odds on it backfiring on the Russians, ‘cos that’s what they do. Tragicomic clown show, all the way around.
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Thanks for the always interesting articles – zerohedge can be useful but critical analysis is often? Lacking.
They’ve changed the code. I’ve added a new PayPal donate link.
They should deploy the “AI Kompleks” on the High-speed, Low-drag T-14 Armata tank. Oh, that’s right, it’s a piece of crap, too. Like most of their gear.
I think these will work as well as Kamchatka, the greatest IJN ship despite never having served in IJN during the Battle of Tsushima, and was supposed to be part of Russian Imperial Navy’s 2nd Pacific Squadron.
Having seen the actual Russian military up close, I am not surprised by their performance, err or lack of it, in Ukraine. This was in a (at the time) recently opened to outsiders Russian military industrial city. As an aside, there were a suspicious amount of uniformed Chinese military present there too. This was back in the early 2000s.
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The Russians have a lengthy history of demonstrating greater vision than they can actually reach. Goes back ferf*ckingever, too… Look at the way they operated under the Great Tsars, like Peter and Katherine. In each reign they had to go to outsiders for up-to-date technology and were held back from development/modernization because of internal recidivists holding them back. Violence was always the answer; Peter slaughtered the boyars, and Katherine emulated him.
The code wasn’t really broken until the Communists showed up and did a top-to-bottom sweeping away of all the entrenched interests, only to put their own entrenched idiot class into power in the same positions, who proceeded to do the same sort of thing that the boyars and others had done under the Tsars–impede change and development.
The only thing the Russians really do well is the forced-draft bullshit that they rely on others to bring in; they’ve demonstrated little to no ability to really develop their own resources, although they have been adept at modifying and adapting what others produce. It’s an interesting study of Russian industry when you go back and look at their arms industry and its history. The arsenals at Izhevsk were initially very primitive; they brought in machine tools from the UK and the US, built out designs based on Belgian technology from a gunsmith named Nagant in the late 19th Century, and then they remained stuck there until the mid-20th when there was a sudden leap of innovation.
What’s fascinating is the Soviet development of machineguns and autocannon; they were leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else in a lot of respects, especially in the autocannon realm. This was because they actually treated weapons design as an academic discipline, unlike here in the West where there isn’t a specialized degree-producing curriculum. It’s also why they seem to have a lot more success producing machineguns, especially when you look at the series of technological travesties produced by the US system after WWII. We rely too much on self-educated geniuses like Browning and Garand, whose weapons then tend to dominate it all. When they’re gone, or superseded by the “company men” who produced crapfests like the M14, the M60, the M73/219, the M85… Yeah. We don’t do so well, at all.
That’s probably the one area of technology and industry where the Soviets/Russians are actually world-class, in some regards. Granted, their small arms/autocannon systems have some issues, but overall? They do pretty well at it. Anywhere else? LOL… Nope.
I seriously doubt that there’s going to be some war-winning artificially-intelligent AT system that comes out of any of this. It’ll more likely be a pure propaganda exercise, one that makes all the credulous go “Ooooh! Aaahhhh!”, and be militarily irrelevant in terms of actual effect on the battlefield.
I’ve been expecting this drone warfare thing to play out along these lines for years, although I thought it’d be more likely to be some high-tech state like Singapore or Lithuania doing the David-vs.-Goliath thing with them. It makes sense that the Ukrainians would manage it, though… People don’t give them all that much credit for being technologically inclined or at all innovative, but when you get down to it, the cultural ‘bones’ are there for it: A nation of farmers who have to keep the machinery going? Who underwent forced-draft industrialization under the Communists? And, who’ve been used and abused by their bigger neighbor for generations going back deep into history?
Yeah, the situation was ripe for it. I shudder to think what Round 2 is going to look like, should the Russians decide to come back for one after this likely defeat. It won’t be at all pretty; I suspect that Ukraine is going to become the Israel of Central Eurasia, right along with Poland.
Matter of fact, I’d go so far as to predict that what we’re actually seeing here is the rise of a de facto second coming of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, with the Ukraine added in to give it some depth and staying power. The Russians don’t realize what they’ve awakened, here, which is probably going to work itself into a belt of opposition stretching from Finland south the Black Sea, eventually including a lot of Belarus once they throw off the Russian clients running the place right now. If I were Poland, I’d be talking to everyone about just this idea, because it’s about the only way they’re all going to be able to stave off another few centuries of Russian domination.