The Future of Warfare is Now: Robots and AI

The idea of using robots in warfare dates back to the 1940s. From WW2-era German Goliaths and Soviet teletanks to Cold War Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), we are steadily moving towards a more robotised battlefield. Projects are many, and development is encouraging, but not without its problems: military and ethical questions quickly come to the surface with high costs.

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Nord Stream 2, a Rift in the EU’s Response to Russia?

As tensions continue to build surrounding the possible invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military, one issue has stood out as a potential point of tension: the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. A significant part of the European Union (EU) still depends on imported natural gas as a source of energy. A sizeable part of that comes from the Russian Federation, the primary import of natural gas to the EU, amounting to 40% of imports (Euractiv, 2022). In that context, any tension with Russia has the potential of having serious consequences for the energy supply of the Union. Russia has been known to use this leverage in negotiations in the past, such as when it turned off all supplies to Ukraine in January 2006 over a dispute regarding payments (Parfitt, the Guardian, 2006). At the time, this has pushed the EU member states to realise the danger of depending on Russia for energy, and incited them to pursue other sources, as well as increase storage capacity in case the EU’s supply was ever cut.

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First Successful Uninhabited for a UH-60A Black Hawk Helicopter

On 8 February, the US company Sikorsky, owned by the Lockheed Martin group, communicated that they completed the first-ever two uninhabited flights with a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter. These first flights are linked to the testing of a new technological system for autonomous driving called MATRIX. The initiative is part of the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program, launched by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It aims to develop portable and removable automation systems for helicopters.

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Raytheon Develops New Software to Bypass the Language Barrier in Research

Retrieving information has always been a key requirement of intelligence analysis. Yet, for centuries, the language barrier has presented a crucial obstacle. In 2017, IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) launched its MATERIAL (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program to solve the age-old problem of cross-language data retrieving. Five years later, Raytheon BBN Technologies seems to have found the solution. The American conglomerate, battling with competitors such as Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, designed software capable of translating search results from all languages to English.

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Turkey and Ukraine TB2 drone agreement

NATO member Turkey and its Black Sea ally Ukraine have agreed to coproduce Turkish-made military drones at a production site in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Defence Minister Olesii Reznikov has recently made public the bilateral agreement between Turkey and Ukraine in the military defence industry.

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