Unmanned Military Weapons to Hit 93,000 Within 10 Years

[cnxvideo id=”655422″ placement=”ros”]The use of ground forces, fighter bombers and surveillance planes will be obsolete, when it comes to many of the tasks they perform. They will be replaced, in many cases by 63,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and 30,000 unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), within 10 years. The industries that make these weapons will benefit by tens of billions of dollars.

Military research firm IHS says that some of these will replace people on “dangerous” missions. At the far end of the spectrum, they will replace people who perform boring military tasks. In both cases, jobs will disappear when it comes to tactical activities performed by humans.

Describing the evolution, Derrick Maple, principal analyst for unmanned systems at IHS, commented: “Unmanned military ground, sea and air vehicle technology is evolving rapidly and we are seeing strong growth across all three sectors over the next five to ten years.” This will drive UAV sales to total of $82 billion worldwide, a windfall to the military arms sector. UGV sales will top $5 billion over the same period.

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IHS does not have a road map for exactly what these new smart machines will do, but it does have a cause for their growth:

Unmanned systems provide operational differentiation and those forces that do not invest in this capability will be at a significant disadvantage. With technology advancing at such a pace, a myriad of applications will unfold limited only by the imagination of the designer.

In other words, their evolution will be created by missions that may not exist now, or ones that allow for changes in whether they can be performed by man or machine.

The foundation of the growth in these devices is largely built on their use in geographically widespread wars, particularly those in Afghanistan and Iraq. Based on an IHS assessment, the methods for fighting in those conflicts will change at a radical level.

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