February 10, 2023
Bureaucrat’s Gambit: Why Is Dmitry Rogozin Sending Russian Uncrewed Ground Vehicles to Ukraine—and Does It Matter?
On February 2, 2023, Russia’s Dmitry Rogozin—a former Roskosmos (space agency) director who has since reinvented himself as a frontline soldier in eastern Ukraine—announced on his Telegram channel that several Marker UGVs (uncrewed ground vehicles) have arrived in the Donbas. His message included a video of two UGVs offloaded from trucks, with a caption that included a promise to start uploading target images and combat algorithms (to the vehicle’s command-and-control modules), and to install antitank weapons, possibly to confront Western-provided Abrams and Leopard tanks.
The Marker’s appearance in the Donbas ahead of other, much larger and heavier vehicles may be more a reflection of a crafty former bureaucrat with the right connections than an actual MOD combat stress test
Russia’s Marker UGV has made the news rounds since its official unveiling around four years ago, mostly due to Russian state media advertising it as proof of the country’s high-tech research and development of sophisticated military weapons and systems. Developed jointly by the Advanced Research Foundation (ARF, a Russian organization with a similar mission set to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Android Technologies, one of Russia’s main developers of robotics, the Marker is presented as a test bed for autonomous, robotic and artificial intelligence technologies.
Read the full article from the Modern War Institute.
More from CNAS
-
Biotech Matters: Public-Private Coordination of Biotechnology
Reports
An appreciation of biotechnology’s great opportunities is, for many commentators, intimately joined with regret about a disconnect between the U.S. government and the private ...
By Richard Danzig
-
$6.6 billion TSMC deal in Arizona the latest in the CHIPS Act’s rollout
Podcast
“President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act just about 20 months ago, which in government time is yesterday. And they’ve hired 200 people,” said Vivek Chilukuri, a senio...
By Vivek Chilukuri
-
Response to NTIA Request for Comment: “Dual Use Foundation Artificial Intelligence Models with Widely Available Model Weights”
Commentary
In February 2024, the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued a Request for Comment (RFC) on the implications of “ope...
By Caleb Withers
-
Biotech Matters: Great Data Competition and Interoperability with Allies and Partners
Reports
Understanding and strengthening America’s biotechnology leadership requires exploring the limits of existing data relevant to the U.S. bioeconomy so that policymakers and the ...
By Michelle Holko
