A battalion of armed robots moves against a unit of soldiers, aiming to seize territory. In the ensuing battle, the robots open fire, communicate with one another and change tactics as needed. Air cover is provided by uncrewed drones; logistical support and supplies are delivered by a separate team of robots. Territory is taken, prisoners captured. When the battle is over, the attacking side has lost several drones and robots, but no human beings have been killed or wounded.
Science fiction? Hardly. Some elements in this scenario – unmanned aerial cover and logistical support – are already commonplace in Ukraine. So are small-scale robot-led military actions. And experts say the other piece – robots leading major battlefield operations – is coming soon.
Ukraine's ex-Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who led a warp-speed campaign to bring an “Army of Drones” to the battlefield, has launched what he calls a “Manhattan Project” to build an “Army of Robots.”
“The goal of the Robot Army is to save human lives,” Fedorov said in a recent presentation. “Robots should perform the most dangerous work so that our soldiers return home.”
“The main question for 2027 is not whether Ukraine will have an army of robots – it already does,” said Morgan, the commander of a Special Operations Group in the DIU (Defense Intelligence of Ukraine), who goes by his call name.
“The question is how quickly we can scale it up, and hand over to robots more of the tasks that people perform today at the risk of their own lives.”
It’s a brave new world of warfighting, and beyond its life-saving promise, it raises questions about non-human decision-making, and how widely and quickly AI-guided robots will displace the world’s soldiers.
“The premise has to be that there will be human control,” Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan (Ret.), who served as the first director of the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told The Cipher Brief.
“What we have to figure out is where, when and how that control gets applied. I do not want to see machines deciding…to do something that the humans never anticipated.”
Major Yabchanka’s Journey
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Oleksandr Yabchanka was a combat medic; today, he commands an unmanned systems platoon for the “Da Vinci Wolves” battalion, and specializes in what he calls “the robotization of combat processes.”
“The route a robot covers today is one that people would previously have had to cover,” Major Yabchanka told The Cipher Brief. “In our conditions, that would mean an extremely high risk of being hit. Robots take that risk upon themselves.”
Nearly every Ukrainian military unit now uses AI-guided robots, or UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles), for a range of mundane but dangerous tasks. Yabchanka described a supply chain that begins with human soldiers in rear positions who hand off ammunition, food and other supplies to UGVs for the proverbial last mile to the front. Robots repair cables and antennas, transfer munitions, and help armored vehicles that are stuck in the mud. And increasingly, they’ve been evacuating wounded soldiers.
“This is one of the most difficult operations, often carried out under intense fire,” Morgan, the Special Operations commander, told The Cipher Brief. “When robotic systems are used for evacuation, the risk is significantly reduced for service members who would otherwise have to go out to help their wounded comrades.” He believes that ground robots have already saved tens of thousands of lives.
“Imagine having to carry a wounded person ten kilometers,” Major Yabchanka said. “It takes a long time, it’s physically exhausting, and once detected, the evacuation team becomes a priority target. We risk losing both the wounded soldier and those who go to save him. That is why we hand this work over to UGVs.”
Ukraine's Defense Ministry reported in September that UGVs had carried out 112,000 logistics and casualty-evacuation missions this year.
“Many of the (scenarios) are no longer science fiction,” Major Yabchanka said. “The question is not so much whether an army of robots is possible, but how quickly we can bring these technologies to the required level of reliability, integrate them into combat processes and ensure their mass use.”
Robot soldiers that think
The holy grail in this robotic evolution is full-scale offensive operations. Call that Mykhailo Fedorov’s dream.
For the moment, battlefield decisions are still made by humans. Those casualty evacuations are overseen by a human operator; and no large “units” of robots have gone into battle alone.
But in small ways, Fedorov’s dream is already a reality.
The New York Times reported on a battle in the Kharkiv region featuring robotic vehicles which advanced on a Russian position – “little green wagons” that “looked like something you might buy at a garden store to move bags of soil.” Each vehicle carried 66 pounds of explosives, and as they neared the Russian troops, an aerial drone dropped a bomb and one of the robots blew itself up.
Two Russian soldiers soon emerged from a trench with a sign that read “We want to surrender.”
In other words, a robot-led attack had resulted in the capture of Russian prisoners. “It is better to throw in metal than people,” Lt. Mykola Zinkevych, who commanded the attack, told the Times. “Human life is precious, and robots don’t bleed.”
More recently, in Ukraine’s Operation Vivaldi in the Donbas, UGVs were dropped by aerial drones deep into Russian lines; the robots then attacked Russian positions. As one of Vivaldi’s commanders, who goes by “Darwin,” told The Cipher Brief, his men would establish a defense line and then wait “until artillery, flying drones and robots do their work, and then go in again.” Darwin said his corps was the first to demonstrate such coordination between autonomous and human elements.
David Kirichenko, an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, said Vivaldi had demonstrated “the inexorable erosion of the usefulness of humans in direct contact with the enemy.”
In another recent milestone, Ukraine’s "Lava" Unmanned Systems Regiment carried out what it said was the world’s first combat logistics mission utilizing an AI-driven ground robot without human supervision. The Defense Ministry said its robot navigated 93 percent of a roughly 12-mile route; a human operator stepped in only for a one-mile stretch where the terrain differed from what mapping software had suggested.
Fedorov’s “Manhattan Project,” which he unveiled at a conference in Lviv in late September, would take all this to scale – battalions of “humanoid robots” that are given a mission and are able to adjust tactics in mid-battle. Swarms of aerial drones have already shown this capability; as Lt. Gen. Shanahan noted, “we’re talking about drone swarms on the ground as opposed to in the air.” Fedorov says his “Army of Robots” is a logical evolution in the autonomous weapons space, and a way to address Ukraine’s manpower shortage.
“We want to eventually substitute our infantry with these robots,” he said.
Fedorov’s plans are supported by a new consortium that includes outside investors including Palantir CEO Alex Karp. In a recent interview, Fedorov said the project had attracted more than 800 applications from companies, engineers, designers and programmers.
As with nearly all military innovation in Ukraine, the “Army of Robots” time horizon is ambitious. Fedorov’s presentation included an initial six-month phase culminating when a “humanoid robot” kills its first Russian soldier; within a year, he said, robots will be ready to conduct major coordinated assaults on their own.
“We don’t have enough time,” Fedorov told the Lviv conference. “We need to achieve these results as soon as possible.”
The Pentagon’s Push
Ukraine is now the widely-recognized global testing ground for new military technology, the home to what Cipher Brief expert and former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus has referred to as “tomorrow's technology for today's wars.”
With this in mind, American manufacturers have sent prototypes of robotic soldiers to Ukraine. In June, San Francisco-based Foundation Future Industries said it had dispatched its Phantom Mk1 robots to Ukraine for battlefield testing. Foundation CEO Sankaet Pathak said he was “convinced the technology is reaching a level where it can replace jobs that are dangerous for humans to perform, and if you can do that, it’s the highest net good you can create out of all applications of robotics.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. and other countries are escalating efforts to boost robotic capabilities within their militaries. In late September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the creation of an Autonomous Warfare Command, and called on all the services to accelerate their autonomous and robotic capabilities.
“We will fuse procurement with operations at scale,” Hegseth said, “and allow warfighters and engineers and entrepreneurs to learn, adapt, and rapidly iterate on their domain.”
“What we’re beginning to see with the U.S military is an increasing emphasis on autonomous systems on the ground side, the sea side and the air side,” Lt. Gen. Shanahan said. “I sense a palpable sense of urgency that I didn’t feel a couple of years ago.”
Experts say the urgency is driven by Ukraine’s successes as well as the possibility of conflict with China. China is developing sophisticated military robotic systems of its own, helped by an already-strong commercial robotics and electronics sector. Recently China showcased quadrupedal ground robots, or “robotic wolves,” which experts say are designed to cover rough and mountainous terrain. Beijing’s broader military strategy emphasizes “intelligentized warfare”; integrating AI, robotics, and data networks into combat operations.
Lt. Gen. Shanahan says such integration will be critical for the U.S. as it boosts its autonomous systems.
“Technically, it’s doable pretty quickly,” Shanahan said. “Organizationally, and the integration piece of it, these are hard things to work through.”
Risks and limitations
Questions abound about the future of robotic armies – not least, their reliability, mobility and ability to react under fire. “Humanoid robots” are expensive, mechanically complicated and – for the moment at least – far less sophisticated than conventional ground vehicles and drones.
“You still need to take ground and hold it to end a war, and both sides have to agree the war is over,” Shanahan said. “You can’t do that with drones on the ground...At some point you will need to end up putting humans on the ground to hold ground or push back.”
Among practical concerns, experts list communications, cost and coordination.
An operator cannot continuously control a robot if the adversary jams its radio links; Major Yabchanka has seen his UGVs frequently disabled by Russian electronic jamming. “For more complex autonomous functions,” he said, “more and more computing has to happen on board the robotic system itself, without depending on an external server or a continuous communication link. This requires additional computing power, sensors and power supply. All of this increases cost.”
In terms of coordination, large “units” of deployed robots must avoid collisions, particularly in a dynamic battlefield. As with other AI-driven systems, experts say repeated battlefield tests will help iron out such problems.
The most profound questions involve the human element. Will human beings remain in control of missions once they are launched? Will robot soldiers identify potential targets? And will robots or humans authorize engagement?
“We get so caught up in technology itself, we forget what the most important piece of it is,” Shanahan said. “How are you going to fight with it? What’s your operating concept? What’s your organizational design, for bringing in all these ground systems? Where do you want to put the humans, where do you want to put the machines?”
Shanahan raised one specific nightmare scenario: a robot unit that collectively “decides” that its mission is best served by striking a civilian target that no human has authorized.
“You could see this robot out there with agentic capability, deciding that the quickest way to end the war is not to hit this thing that the human wants it to hit, but to hit that hospital over there because the enemy will back down once 500 civilians are killed in a hospital off the battlefield,” Shanahan said. “That’s a catastrophe in the making.”
Even frontline commanders in Ukraine, who crave every technological edge they can get, share such concerns.
“Questions that once seemed like fiction are now becoming entirely practical,” Major Yabchanka said. “Today, in most of the systems we work with, the decision to use lethal force remains with the operator. But technology is already moving toward a point where that decision could be handed over to a machine…We could end up in a situation where the decision to kill a human being gradually ceases to be a human decision. This is a very dangerous stage of technological development, and humanity should not rush toward it.”
Morgan, the special operations commander, shares these concerns. But he also calls Ukraine’s AI-driven robots “one of our enormous advantages over Russia.”
Yabchanka agrees. “Robotization is not just a new technology,” he said. “It is our competitive advantage and one of the main paths to victory over an enemy with far greater manpower. This is not just a matter of technological progress. I am convinced that this is how we can win this war.”
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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