Unmanned Combat Ground Vehicle
- Thread starter rhino123
- Start date
I'm not in the E-4 mafia
and also served in a time before this anyways. No idea how the doctrine has evolved. Take it with a mountain of salt ...As I was exiting the service, there were already use of various ground based deployable "eyes" for very close range recce but nothing capable of taking the fight to the enemy.
At the heavier levels of UGV you linked to above, the difference between want-to and able-to sacrifice a machine really depends on your level of unit mechanisation (mobility). Any such UGV is going to be heavy, hardly man-portable, which means at the small unit tactical level, it's not going to be available unless you are a mechanised unit with significant portage capability. In which case, you have many more capabilities at your disposal up to and including full sized unmanned AFV/IFV (see SG Army's Hunter AFV for example). In the case of a legs unit, if it gets brought up to the front, it will be a case of use-it-or-lose-it as there is no capability to "bring it along". Just abandon it with the attached operators who will have to figure out their own way (and security) back to Coy/Bn HQ.
In the real world, barring excellent training, discipline and CC - anything and everything will get used up if it means the grunt doesn't get shot up and/or carries less weight. Case in point, the documented widespread use of ATGMs for (very) low value targets in OIF, simply because. Given the oppourtunity, your 2xLAW/AT4 carriers in a typical squad likewise is not going to conserve those tubes for doctrinal targets. He's going to badger the Section/Team leader for every oppourtunity and lose himself up to 9kg of weight first chance he gets (in the case of SAF's Matador).
So the difference between "doctrinal" - the textbook of how you are supposed to do it and "actual" (a.k.a Real Life™) is that the grunt on the ground decides. In the face of putting their fragile bodies on the line or a robot, no prizes for guessing which a grunt will choose. So as long as you can keep a steady supply of $3k bots to the troops, they will keep pushing them out in front to recce and draw fire. The commander that tells the grunt to conserve bots and take point is not going to be very popular.
With that said, they are more useful in MOUT than most other scenarios because FoV is naturally restricted and as such, the restricted FoV of optics vs Mk 1 eyeball isn't as pronounced - looking around corners and poking heads into uncleared buildings/rooms is where they currently excel. TI is also crucial, EO is quite useless in Jungle/Closed terrain due to stability/fidelity of the optics. Target vs Background contrast in an Urban environment is also more stark. A bot pushing point on an unsealed track is just going to be noisier and more limited than a grunts although they do the role of tripping wires very well. I think small, hand sized UAVs still have a significant edge over UGVs in many environments in both active -shooter and passive-recce roles.
Something similar came in not long after I served my last manning, about 10~12 years ago.
The below factsheet is from 2006 = 18 years ago for reference.
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