Robots Fighting African War Games

Ajouté : 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance in defense of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security. We need innovation to come from anywhere.

[00:00:20]We're here in Tantan, Morocco in Camp America. Uh we came here four years ago, largest military exercise in the world at the time because it was Russia, America. Now warfare has changed.

[00:00:34]>> Now there's been quite a paradigm shift as you've we now have very lowcost solutions that are both precise and effective.

[00:00:42]>> Drones.

[00:00:43]>> Drones. But >> robots.

[00:00:45]>> Robots. Communications equipment.

[00:00:47]>> AI.

[00:00:48]>> Exactly. Actually, we saw some of the stuff today and we're going to see what is the future of asymmetric warfare.

[00:00:57]>> There's a lot of reasons why this is the moment. When you look at the modern battlefield, as you see in Ukraine, um it's it's so now extremely lethal um that there is a strong drive for something like an unmanned ground vehicle to basically get our soldiers out of the battlefield. I think that it's it's very clear to most people now that technology on the battlefield is inevitable and it is very important to us that the United States and our allies have the most advanced technology and that's why we keep pushing this forward.

[00:01:25]>> Today you'll be watching the third of three vignettes for the seat a command field exercise.

[00:01:31]>> We're here at African lion. This is asymmetric future warfare. you'll see the implementation of robotic forces to include two autonomous ground vehicles, one of which is weaponized with a crow's weapon system.

[00:01:44]>> This is a it's a very important question. It's basically the ethics of autonomy on the battlefield. Um the fact is right now for anything that is lethal, there is a human in the loop uh for anything that we deploy. And so we've, you know, deployed a crows system on these where there is there's a human operator operating the crows. It's a remote weapon station, right? So, it's a it's basically a turret where you can mount uh something like an M240 uh machine gun. Um there's a human in the loop on that. Um for the APOB system, which is the line charge on this, there's a human in the loop on the firing and detonation of that. Um and I think it's important that um that we consider this and and and the safety and the ethics of this um as we move forward. But the fact is that the technology moves so fast that we need to have the options available when that is what it takes to win.

[00:02:37]And we're going to see a lot of fighting with no humans.

[00:02:51]We're executing an AI acceleration strategy that will extend our lead in military AI established during President Trump's first term. This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future. There is definitely a future where robots are fighting and killing other robots. And I think we have seen battles in Ukraine that have been entirely uncrrewed assets out there fighting each other. Um the fact is whoever has the best technology is going to win those fights.

[00:03:39]Vice News uses PDF spaces from Acrobat to research and plan our reporting, including from here on the ground in North Africa.

[00:03:48]We're deep in the desert of southern Morocco for African Lion 26. It's a multi-country joint military exercise and there's been a different focus each year. This year it's really heavily on AI and tech. Today we met some guys from a company called Overland AI. They have an autonomous off-road vehicle that has multiple mounting points that the military can use for any sort of situation that they want. Tomorrow we're going back north to Agadier and I just want to check my PDF space here for all these documents we have about African lion. Before coming, we got multiple documents, maybe 20 some odd PDFs that are all multi-page documents, and they have all kinds of information about who's here and the schedule and what's going on. So, I can do some additional research and plan logistics for the rest of the shoot. I can just sort of ask the questions I want and get them in real time without having to dig through all of this paperwork.

[00:04:52]>> And our audience can dig in, too. With PDF spaces, they can read our sources, check the facts for themselves, and use AI assistant to chat with the documents behind our work.