Pentagon seeks smarter, self-organizing drones as autonomous-warfare budget is poised to skyrocket

(Patrick Tucker – Defense One) Two requests to industry may help the Pentagon address one of the emerging challenges of warfare: enabling a relatively small number of human operators to direct a far larger number of robots. The Materials for Physical Compute in Untethered Robotics effort seeks to make autonomous systems more intelligent, while Decentralized Artificial Intelligence through Controlled Emergence aims to help robots form teams and carry out missions. These DARPA projects may feed ideas to the Defense Autonomous Working Group, the lead Pentagon office for drone warfare, whose budget would soar from $226 million this year to $54 billion under the new 2027 spending proposal. Much of that huge sum will be wasted if the military spends it before establishing a clear understanding of how operators will buy, train on, use, and maintain autonomous weapons, according to a recent commentary piece by David Petraeus, the retired Army general and former CIA director, and scholar Isaac Flanagan. Writing for The Hill, they argue that the lack of such understanding constrained the use of drones during the past decade of U.S. wars in the Middle East. – Pentagon seeks smarter, self-organizing drones as autonomous-warfare budget is poised to skyrocket – Defense One