Mobile Tech & Gadgets

The British inventor Ernest Swinton first proposed using “land ships” to cross trenches and avoid sending infantry directly into fire. That idea gave rise to first modern tank a year later. Now, more than a century later, the logic is the same again: find a machine that can go where a soldier no longer can. A front that is too deadly. The war in Ukraine has entered a point where the simple act of sending men towards the line of contact begins to be too expensive a luxury. The saturation of drones has turned wide swaths of the front into real death zones where any movement is detected and punished almost instantly. This has changed the logic of the battle because it is no longer just about who has more armor or more artillery, but about who can continue hitting without exposing bodies. And here Ukraine is beginning to embrace a radical idea: if the front devours soldiers, perhaps the time has come to stop sending soldiers. The birth of a new “Frankenstein”. The Ukrainian response is as pragmatic as it is disturbing: take weapons systems designed for fixed positions and assemble them about ground robots. In fact, companies like Frontline Robotics They have converted their turret autonomous Buria (a kind of metal arm capable of firing machine guns or grenade launchers) into something new: small armed unmanned vehicles that act as micro-tanks. They are not tanks in the classic sense, but they fulfill part of their function. They move, shoot, seek cover and attack without a human being inside. It is a kind of improvised hybrid, a creature assembled with different parts to survive a battlefield that no longer forgives. The war against Russian infiltrations. The immediate objective of these robots is not major offensives, but something much more specific: hunt small groups of Russian infiltration. Moscow has been exploiting a simple but effective tactic for months: send small teams of infantry that slip between lines, forests and trenches to avoid aerial surveillance and penetrate Ukrainian defenses. They are small movements, difficult to detect and cheap to execute. Ukraine has understood that responding by sending more infantry only feeds that crusher. So now he sends armed robots, controlled from dozens of kilometers away, to intercept them before they go deeper into the line. The classic tank is getting old. There is a compelling reason why this idea is gaining traction: traditional tanks They are suffering greatly. Both Ukraine and Russia have discovered that a multi-million euro armored vehicle can be destroyed by a cheap drone in a matter of minutes. The economic equation has been broken. In that context, an armed terrestrial robot is a brutally logical solution: it costs less, it is manufactured faster and if it is destroyed no one dies. It is a mutation of the armored concept. Less armor, less power, less glamour… but more expendable. And in an industrial war, the expendable is often more valuable than the perfect. Evolution at the speed of war. The most striking thing is the speed with which all this evolves. Frontline Robotics It ensures that it introduces small changes up to twenty times a month and major updates every six months. The battlefield works like real time laboratory. Soldiers send constant feedback, and companies adapt their machines almost on the fly. It is a brutal advantage compared to the bureaucratic slowness of many Western industries. What today is a robot with a machine gunwithin a few months it may be a much more sophisticated system. Put another way, Ukraine is learning faster because it has no choice. Defend without humans. The underlying idea is more than a simple tactical innovation. Ukraine has already used ground robots to evacuate woundedcarry supplies, place mines and clear routes. This year they have made more than 50,000 missionsa gigantic jump compared to just 2,000 the previous semester. But what is truly new is the offensive leap: Russian positions captured only with aerial drones and ground robots, without a single infantry entering first. There has even been surrenders to machines. This paints a disturbing future: entire sectors defended and attacked by unmanned systems, where humans are increasingly distant from the point of impact. The ground war is mutating. What Ukraine is doing with these robot tanks may seem improvised, even almost artisanal, but it contains a transformation a lot more fat. For centuries, conquering land meant sending men into fire. Now start mean send machines. Not because they are better at everything, but because they are sacrificial. And on a front where every meter costs blood, the priority is no longer to advance bravely, but rather preserve lives. For this reason, Ukraine is not simply building new robots: it is testing a new way of waging ground warfare where the soldier is no longer the first piece to move. Image | Frontline Robotics, Oleksandr Klymenko/Ukrinform In Xataka | Satellite images revealed that Russia covered a building with an anti-drone cage. Ukraine turned it into an action movie set In Xataka | The drone war in Ukraine just solved an old military obsession: how to blow up a bridge without tons of bombs