The Russian Armed Forces' Robotization Aspirations

Given both the escalation of interstate conflict in our time, in which tension between Russia and the West, and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict in particular, have been central; and the upsurge of interest in artificial intelligence research and its applications in the military as other spheres; the March 2023 report by the RAND Corporation's Krystyna Marcinek and Eugeniu Han regarding the Russian government's aspirations to the robotization of its military forces (Russia's Asymmetric Response to 21st Century Strategic Competition: Robotization of the Armed Forces) would seem especially timely.

The document, which runs to 132 pages all told, details the concept of robotization not only as understood generally but as it appears to be understood specifically among Russian military thinkers and policymakers; the Russian government's stated plans in this direction; the actual work done to achieve robotization of the Russian armed forces; and Russia's technological-industrial potential to achieve its goals.

As might be expected the mass of organizational, technical and even linguistic detail is considerable (the last seeing the authors decipher particular usages in the Russian literature for the benefit of Western readers who, even if among the very few possessing Russian language fluency, might not have a good grasp of the relevant terminology). Still, they manage to handle the material intelligibly, while in this moment when emotions are running high, and the old analytical baggage surrounding assessments of Russian industrial, technological and military performance can seem to weigh even more heavily than usual, the authors seem to me to manage to treat the subject intelligibly, and with some fair-mindedness.

The result is that they come to some interesting conclusions about differences in the thinking on military robotization as between Russia and the West. In particular, they argue that the Russian government is, if anything, more ambitious than the West with regard to robotization--that one can see this in their greater hope of replacing rather than augmenting human personnel with robots (hence, "robotization"); the signs they give of greater expectations of soon being able to deploy significant numbers of combat robots on the ground, like unmanned tanks; and their apparently greater willingness to countenance those systems using deadly force on an autonomous, no-human-in-the-loop basis. The authors also acknowledge the distance between the actual state-of-the-art in Russian, and everyone else's, robotics. And, as suggested by the title of their study itself (foregrounding "asymmetric response" while relegating mention of robotics to the subtitle), they stress the extent to which the government's ambitions reflect the difficulties of its situation--not least its demographic limitations relative to its rivals, and what its government may see as a geopolitical balance shifting disadvantageously in the near term. (Russia, after all, is a country of 150 million--as against a NATO alliance of some 900 million and growing, or a China of 1.4 billion--while even a Russian military devoted solely to homeland defense of the Russian Federation's territory would have that less than 2 percent of the world's population trying to hold a sixth of the world's landmass.)

The result is that the Russian government's high aspirations in the field of robotics can seem to come down to the hope of "wonder weapons" helping to salvage a worsening security situation--to an implausible degree. After all, overoptimism about the possible rate of progress aside, the fact remains that if Russia is not without some strengths here (among them a good STEM educational system, a relatively well-digitized economy and a genuinely serious government commitment here), it is far from clear how it would vault ahead of the rest of the world in this area given its not only being well behind other nations in even relatively easy areas like the less-demanding aerial drones to the point of relying heavily on foreign inputs for their production, numerous factors handicap it in any "race to AI superweaponry"--be it its having a much smaller industrial base than many other major states (its industrial disadvantage actually far exceeding its demographic disadvantage); its pointed weakness in many of the specific technological areas relevant to producing such weaponry (like the production of semiconductors, and their own required inputs); the difficulties for its activity posed by a sanctions regime increasingly incorporating the most important producers in those fields where it relies on imports (directed against not just Russia, but its important partner China); and the many enduring obstacles to its development broadly (like slight industry-academic collaboration, and the prospect of a "brain drain" as underemployed talent leaves the country for work abroad). Still, no one should be under any illusions about such problems being uniquely Russian, with, to all evidences, every major power currently and significantly a captive of technological hype as it copes with a world situation that is not all that any of them would like it to be.