WASHINGTON — This spring, soldiers from the 3rd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division stood idle while drones buzzed overhead and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) trudged forward in their places. For the first time the soldiers would see for themselves if robots could take out the adversarial defenses, albeit pretend, before they would have to hypothetically risk their own lives to defeat the enemy.
Such an exercise is referred to as a robotic combined arms breach — where uncrewed ground and aerial vehicles are used to defeat enemy defenses — Col. Ryan Bell, commander of the 3rd MBCT, 101st Division, told Breaking Defense in a recent interview. The exercise was part of the larger Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) rotation in Fort Polk, Louisiana in April.
“The most dangerous point in a fight for an infantry battalion is the breach point where I’m trying to breach an obstacle — usually around like a trench or a defense,” Bell said. In this scenario, breach points refer to heavily defended territory with mined wired obstacles. These areas are typically where brigades “take the most casualties.”
“The task was, can we, with robots, make this uncontested for the rifleman? So when the rifleman gets to the breach, everybody’s dead, there’s nobody left defending, because we were able to defeat them with robots,” Bell added.
