Surveillance camera
The Chinese military unveiled a robotic combat dog equipped with a machine gun during a joint exercise with Cambodia.
CNN
—
It may seem like something out of the dystopian drama “Black Mirror,” but this is cutting-edge robotics adapted for the modern battlefield.
During a recent military exercise with Cambodia, the Chinese military unveiled a robot dog equipped with an automatic rifle on its back, essentially turning man’s best (electronic) friend into a killing machine.
“The fighter jet can serve as a new member of urban combat operations, replacing our (human) personnel in conducting reconnaissance, identifying enemies and attacking targets,” a soldier who gave his name as Chen Wei said in a video broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV.
The two-minute video, made during China-Cambodia’s “Golden Dragon 2024” exercise, also shows the robot dog walking, jumping, lying down and retreating under the control of a remote operator.
In one training exercise, a rifle-firing robot guides a unit of infantry into a mock building.
Later in the video, an automatic rifle is also seen mounted underneath the six-rotor aerial drone, showing what the video describes as China’s “variety of intelligent unmanned devices.”
Military use of robot dogs, and of course small aerial drones, is nothing new: CCTV footage last year showed a Chinese rifle-equipped electronic dog during a joint military exercise in China in November last year between the militaries of China, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Surveillance camera
The Chinese military unveiled a robotic combat dog equipped with a machine gun during a joint exercise with Cambodia.
In 2020, the U.S. Air Force demonstrated how it could use a robotic dog as part of its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which uses artificial intelligence and rapid data analysis to detect and counter threats to U.S. military assets.
And since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, drones have become commonplace on land, sea and air battlefields, allowing inexpensive remotely controlled vehicles to take out advanced military machinery like tanks and warships.
The lethality of drones witnessed on the battlefields of Ukraine has demonstrated that they provide a great equalizer, allowing militaries with smaller defense budgets to compete with much better-armed and better-funded opponents.
China is the world’s leading exporter of drones, but last year the Department of Commerce introduced export controls on drone technology, citing the need to “protect national security and interests.”
Still, the robot dogs appear to be a big PR hit for the People’s Liberation Army.
And the dogs have been appearing on China’s heavily regulated social media for at least a year.
The robot dog’s participation in drills with foreign militaries shows it is at an advanced stage of development, state media Global Times said.
“Usually, new equipment is not brought into joint exercises with other countries, so the robot dog must have reached a certain level of technological maturity,” the Global Times quoted an anonymous expert as saying.
