Key Points

• China’s creation of robotic war dogs, or autonomous quadrupedal ground vehicles (QGVs), is likely to have a major influence on future combat, including challenging areas like Taiwan’s mountainous terrain.
• These military dogs are an asymmetrical force multiplier since they can perform a range of duties.
• Robotic war dogs have several tactical purposes, including offensive and defensive ones
• Also: Secure your future with these two dividend legend stocks that keep making investors rich

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Transcript:

[00:00:00] Austin Smith: Well, let’s move on to, the most recent terrifying, new military development, and that’s China. What we are seeing is China’s development of robotic military war dogs. What are these? And while it might sound sort of novel, what’s the application of a vehicle like this? We’ve talked a lot about the mountainous terrain of Taiwan how difficult an invasion would be my mind immediately goes to something like that. So so what what is it that china’s military is developing and why are they developing them?

[00:00:25] Michael Muir: Sure. So the war dog, I mean, it’s we’re calling it a war dog for for ease of of definition there’s nothing essentially canine about them apart from appearance you know officially they are unmanned quadrupedal ground vehicles or QGV, but we’ll just call them war dogs. It’s a lot easier than saying that.

[00:00:45] Michael Muir: Right. Yeah, so this is, something that China, they unveiled some training footage. it’s quite terrifying actually looking at it is this robotic war dog with a rifle attached to it, controlled by a human operator. So there’s a lot of different applications here. you talked about the difficulty, if China is.

[00:01:09] Michael Muir: So, this has one eye on on Taiwan, so to speak, one of the other aspects of Taiwan as well as mountainous terrain. There’s a lot of urban environments, especially the northwest of the island is, very densely populated and as we have. It’s the most difficult, it’s the most difficult operational environment for the infantry.

[00:01:28] Michael Muir: The typical force ratio, for an attacker and defender, this is just a rule of thumb is that to be confident of success, the attacker needs a three to one advantage, but an urban warfare that grows to about seven to one, that’s the manpower, munitions, et cetera. So, what a war dog can do is it can really help even, it can really help take a lot of the danger out of urban warfare.

[00:01:52] Michael Muir: Why not aerial drones you might ask? Well, by walking along the, well one thing it could, by walking along the surface it could be used very, effectively in an indoor environment, which can be quite difficult for an aerial drone to be controlled. The second one is it will trigger any booby traps or mines.

[00:02:08] Michael Muir: And so just to put it into perspective, the war dogs that we saw in this training footage were modified civilian models from a Chinese company called Unitree. It’s the go to pro I think it is. I looked at the cost, it’s less than 3, 000. And then if you, yeah, and then that’s just the commercially available one.

[00:02:31] Michael Muir: So if you’d imagine what a bulk order might do, although unitary do say they don’t sell directly to the military, but there’s nothing much stopping them. In fact, Ukraine have a few of them too.

[00:02:39] Austin Smith: I guess the point is it’s, it’s a terrifying asymmetry on the cost perspective. Even if it’s in that zone.

[00:02:44] Austin Smith: If it’s a multiple of that, it’s still dramatically cheaper than other equivalent vehicles. And we would prefer a fleet of the, or any, any, I shouldn’t say we actually any. military would prefer a fleet of those to a single soldier, right? So we’re talking whether it’s 3,000 or 10,000 or 20,000. It’s still asymmetrically more, affordable and capable in some capacities than than actual soldiers.

[00:03:08] Michael Muir: Yeah, so getting back to the the urban environment so they can trigger all these mines they can so You know, any explosive that’s triggered by a war dog is one that’s not triggered by a human. So that’s saving lives straight away. Aerial drones won’t do that. They’re extremely difficult to detect as well.

[00:03:24] Michael Muir: Thermal imaging doesn’t work. So they can creep up. they can screen in advance. They don’t, they’re not just fitted with rifles. They can be fitted with just about anything that can You know, be mounted to them. So different types of sensor, for example, or explosives. I’m reminded of an experiment the Soviet Union did in World War II with literal dogs, as an anti tank method where they would train the dogs to look for food underneath tanks.

[00:03:49] Michael Muir: And then they would strap an explosive to their back. And, I think you can see how the rest of this worked out. The problem the Soviets had was they trained them with Soviet tanks. So didn’t But with a robotic war dog, you don’t have to train them, obviously, because it’s a human operator.

[00:04:07] Michael Muir: And then they could create, you could imagine setting these loose at night. Tank has no real way of seeing them. They could get up close. And again, we talked about the cost, 3, 000, plus whatever the explosive costs. How much does a modern tank cost? Multiples of that, you could lose 10 of them, 100 of them trying, you back one tank and then that’s investments worked out, it’s just this real nightmare scenario because, there is no, you don’t need great resources.

[00:04:35] Michael Muir: You don’t need a lot of money for this. And there’s so many places they could hide in an urban environment. I’m just using that as an example, but they can still be used in the field as well. So there’s great versatility saves a lot of lives. An absolute night, great for potentially for, the offense on, taking an urban environment, but also could be used defensively too by non state actors.

[00:04:59] Michael Muir: There’s another problem, which is really kind of strange, but there has actually been some pretty good research into this, is Well, their appearance, we’ve talked to is a little scary. They have been used for policing purposes as well, but that has drawn a lot of backlash. New York City tried it, but the backlash, the public backlash was so severe, they had to pull them out.

[00:05:19] Michael Muir: They can be used for perimeter defense really effectively. In fact, when I was writing an article about robot war dogs, when I was sourcing images, one of the things I found was the Secret Service used them. Yeah, that was actually one of the images I used. And, so they’re great for security. They can be used for counter UAV, operations.

[00:05:39] Michael Muir: So that’s in development. The United States is experimenting with this. Cause again, the problem with drones is they’re so cheap. There’s so many of them, but the answer to that could be a war dog with, an AI powered turret that could take down. continuously, patrol the perimeter of a base and could take down, drones that way.

[00:05:58] Michael Muir: But there’s another very strange problem with war dogs, related to their appearance. And this is, it’s a uniquely human thing. It is the problem of attachment.

[00:06:08] Austin Smith: Hmm. Interesting. Go on.

[00:06:10] Michael Muir: Yeah. So there are, there was a PhD study that was done by a researcher, I think her name is Julie Carpenter, she found that people that worked in bomb disposal. Highly trained, professional, military personnel, and they got really attached to the robots that they used to disarm explosives.

[00:06:33] Michael Muir: And that’s, it looks like a robot doesn’t have any resemblance to a pet, but they started to think of them as their pets. Robot war dogs, of course are a lot more, are a lot closer to canines in appearance. And I think there is this possibility. So there has, there’s been good research into this to find that people do get attached to the robots that use and that emotional connection would be all the greater with a dog.

[00:06:59] Michael Muir: Even though it’s, it’s an inanimate object doesn’t think or feel it just does whatever it’s controlled to do But humans are very strange sentimental creatures like that And I think that there is the risk that an operator would get a little too fond of their their war dog and might be a little hesitant to use it properly It’s just one of the very strange things that when we we get into this sort of human robotic dynamic, you know people are strange.

[00:07:23] Michael Muir: So that is just a risk that we may not have anticipated, but that could be a possibility and I would classify war dogs as robotic war dogs as it is. We’re kind of in the puppy stage. We don’t really have potential yet. But I think the possibilities, the tactical applications, the low cost, the versatility, I think they’re, they could become standard issues just because of the sheer range of possibilities we’ll see.

[00:07:50] Austin Smith: Well, there’s never, there’s never a dull moment, whether we’re talking about history or the conflicts or current, technologies or future, future applications, there’s never a dull moment in geopolitics.

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