Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from Ars Technica: The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic "dogs" developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone. While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics' quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called "Q-UGVs" for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it's the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it's not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past. MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously. On LinkedIn, Onyx Industries shared a video of a similar system in action. In a statement to The War Zone, MARSOC states that weaponized payloads are just one of many use cases being evaluated. MARSOC also clarifies that comments made by Onyx Industries to The War Zone regarding the capabilities and deployment of these armed robot dogs "should not be construed as a capability or a singular interest in one of many use cases during an evaluation."

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America's Defense Department "is rushing to expand its capacity to wage war in space," reports the New York Times, "convinced that rapid advances by China and Russia in space-based operations pose a growing threat to U.S. troops and other military assets on the ground and U.S. satellites in orbit." [T]he Defense Department is looking to acquire a new generation of ground- and space-based tools that will allow it to defend its satellite network from attack and, if necessary, to disrupt or disable enemy spacecraft in orbit, Pentagon officials have said in a series of interviews, speeches and recent statements... [T]he move to enhance warfighting capacity in space is driven mostly by China's expanding fleet of military tools in space... [U.S. officials are] moving ahead with an effort they are calling "responsible counterspace campaigning," an intentionally ambiguous term that avoids directly confirming that the United States intends to put its own weapons in space. But it also is meant to reflect this commitment by the United States to pursue its interest in space without creating massive debris fields that would result if an explosive device or missile were used to blow up an enemy satellite. That is what happened in 2007, when China used a missile to blow up a satellite in orbit. The United States, China, India and Russia all have tested such missiles. But the United States vowed in 2022 not to do any such antisatellite tests again. The United States has also long had ground-based systems that allow it to jam radio signals, disrupting the ability of an enemy to communicate with its satellites, and is taking steps to modernize these systems. But under its new approach, the Pentagon is moving to take on an even more ambitious task: broadly suppress enemy threats in orbit in a fashion similar to what the Navy does in the oceans and the Air Force in the skies. The article notes a recent report drafted by a former Space Force colonel cited three ways to disable enemy satellite networks: cyberattacks, ground or space-based lasers, and high-powered microwaves. "John Shaw, a recently retired Space Force lieutenant general who helped run the Space Command, agreed that directed-energy devices based on the ground or in space would probably be a part of any future system. 'It does minimize debris; it works at the speed of light,' he said. 'Those are probably going to be the tools of choice to achieve our objective." The Pentagon is separately working to launch a new generation of military satellites that can maneuver, be refueled while in space or have robotic arms that could reach out and grab — and potentially disrupt — an enemy satellite. Another early focus is on protecting missile defense satellites. The Defense Department recently started to require that a new generation of these space-based monitoring systems have built-in tools to evade or respond to possible attack. "Resiliency feature to protect against directed energy attack mechanisms" is how one recent missile defense contract described it. Last month the Pentagon also awarded contracts to two companies — Rocket Lab and True Anomaly — to launch two spacecraft by late next year, one acting as a mock enemy and the other equipped with cameras, to pull up close and observe the threat. The intercept satellite will not have any weapons, but it has a cargo hold that could carry them. The article notes that Space Force's chief of space operations has told Senate appropriators that about $2.4 billion of the $29.4 billion in Space Force's proposed 2025 budget was set aside for "space domain awareness." And it adds that the Pentagon "is working to coordinate its so-called counterspace efforts with major allies, including Britain, Canada and Australia, through a multinational operation called Operation Olympic Defender. France has been particularly aggressive, announcing its intent to build and launch by 2030 a satellite equipped with a high-powered laser." [W]hat is clear is that a certain threshold has now been passed: Space has effectively become part of the military fighting domain, current and former Pentagon officials said. "By no means do we want to see war extend into space," Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt, deputy chief of space operations, said at a Mitchell Institute event this year. "But if it does, we have to be prepared to fight and win."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Caroline Haskins: On May 7th and 8th in Washington, D.C., the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it. It was the inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness," hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project -- better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces. The conference hall was also filled with booths representing the U.S. military and dozens of its contractors, ranging from Booz Allen Hamilton to a random company that was described to me as Uber for airplane software. At industry conferences like these, powerful people tend to be more unfiltered – they assume they're in a safe space, among friends and peers. I was curious, what would they say about the AI-powered violence in Gaza, or what they think is the future of war? Attendees were told the conference highlight would be a series of panels in a large room toward the back of the hall. In reality, that room hosted just one of note. Featuring Schmidt and the Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, the fire-breathing panel would set the tone for the rest of the conference. More specifically, it divided attendees into two groups: those who see war as a matter of money and strategy, and those who see it as a matter of death. The vast majority of people there fell into group one. I've written about relationships between tech companies and the military before, so I shouldn't have been surprised by anything I saw or heard at this conference. But when it ended, and I departed DC for home, it felt like my life force had been completely sucked out of my body. Some of the noteworthy quotes from the panel and convention, as highlighted in Haskins' reporting, include: "It's always great when the CIA helps you out," Schmidt joked when CIA deputy director David Cohen lent him his microphone when his didn't work. The U.S. has to "scare our adversaries to death" in war, said Karp. On university graduates protesting Israel's war in Gaza, Karp described their views as a "pagan religion infecting our universities" and "an infection inside of our society." "The peace activists are war activists," Karp insisted. "We are the peace activists." A huge aspect of war in a democracy, Karp went on to argue, is leaders successfully selling that war domestically. "If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any armies in the west ever," Karp said. A man in nuclear weapons research jokingly referred to himself as "the new Oppenheimer."

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Senior Department arms control official Paul Dean on Thursday urged China and Russia to declare that artificial intelligence would never make decisions on deploying nuclear weapons. Washington had made a "clear and strong commitment" that humans had total control over nuclear weapons, said Dean. Britain and France have made similar commitments. Reuters reports: "We would welcome a similar statement by China and the Russian Federation," said Dean, principal deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability. "We think it is an extremely important norm of responsible behaviour and we think it is something that would be very welcome in a P5 context," he said, referring to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

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The Associated Press reports: As their rivalry intensifies, U.S. and Chinese military planners are gearing up for a new kind of warfare in which squadrons of air and sea drones equipped with artificial intelligence work together like swarms of bees to overwhelm an enemy. The planners envision a scenario in which hundreds, even thousands of the machines engage in coordinated battle. A single controller might oversee dozens of drones. Some would scout, others attack. Some would be able to pivot to new objectives in the middle of a mission based on prior programming rather than a direct order. The world's only AI superpowers are engaged in an arms race for swarming drones that is reminiscent of the Cold War, except drone technology will be far more difficult to contain than nuclear weapons. Because software drives the drones' swarming abilities, it could be relatively easy and cheap for rogue nations and militants to acquire their own fleets of killer robots. The Pentagon is pushing urgent development of inexpensive, expendable drones as a deterrent against China acting on its territorial claim on Taiwan. Washington says it has no choice but to keep pace with Beijing. Chinese officials say AI-enabled weapons are inevitable so they, too, must have them. The unchecked spread of swarm technology "could lead to more instability and conflict around the world," said Margarita Konaev, an analyst with Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. "A 2023 Georgetown study of AI-related military spending found that more than a third of known contracts issued by both U.S. and Chinese military services over eight months in 2020 were for intelligent uncrewed systems..." according to the article. "Military analysts, drone makers and AI researchers don't expect fully capable, combat-ready swarms to be fielded for five years or so, though big breakthroughs could happen sooner."

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Foreign Policy magazine visits a U.S. military training exercise that pitted Lt. Isaac McCurdy and his platoon of infantry troops against machines with camera lenses for eyes and sheet metal for skin: Driving on eight screeching wheels and carrying enough firepower on their truck beds to fill a small arms depot, a handful of U.S. Army robots stormed through the battlefield of the fictional city of Ujen. The robots shot up houses where the opposition force hid. Drones that had been loitering over the battlefield for hours hovered above McCurdy and his team and dropped "bombs" — foam footballs, in this case — right on top of them, a perfectly placed artillery shot. Robot dogs, with sensors for heads, searched houses to make sure they were clear. "If you see the whites of someone's eyes or their sunglasses, [and] you shoot back at that, they're going to have a human response," McCurdy said. "If it's a robot pulling up, shooting something that's bigger than you can carry yourself, and it's not going to just die when you shoot a center mass, it's a very different feeling." In the United States' next major war, the Army's brass is hoping that robots will be the ones taking the first punch, doing the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs that killed hundreds — likely thousands — of the more than 7,000 U.S. service members who died during two decades of wars in the Middle East. The goal is to put a robot in the most dangerous spot on the battlefield instead of a 19-year-old private fresh out of basic training... [Several] Army leaders believe that almost every U.S. Army unit, down to the smallest foot patrols, will soon have drones in the sky to sense, protect, and attack. And it won't be long before the United States is deploying ground robots into battle in human-machine teams. The robots haven't been tested with live ammunition yet — or in colder temperatures, the magazine notes. (And at one point in the exercise, "Army officials jammed themselves, and a swarm of drones dropped out of the sky.) But the U.S. Army is "considering a proposal to add a platoon of robots, the equivalent of 20 to 50 human soldiers, to its armored brigade combat team." Six generals and several colonels watched the exercise, according to the article, which notes that the ultimate goal isn't to replace all human soldiers. "The point is to get the advantage before China or Russia do."

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