Chinese army shows off robot dogs with rifles

(CNN) — It looks something like the dystopian series “Black Mirror,” but it’s the latest adaptation of robotics to the modern battlefield.

During a recent military exercise with Cambodia, China’s military showed off a robot dog with an automatic rifle mounted on its back, essentially turning man’s best (electronic) friend into a killing machine.

“It can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations, replacing our (human) members to conduct reconnaissance and identify the enemy and attack targets,” a soldier named Chen Wei says in a video by state broadcaster CCTV.

The two-minute video, made during the China-Cambodia exercise “Golden Dragon 2024”, also shows the robot dog walking, jumping, lying down and moving backwards under the control of a remote operator.

In one exercise, a rifle-shooting robot leads an infantry unit into a simulated building.

The latter half of the video shows an automatic rifle mounted underneath a six-rotor aerial drone, indicating what the video describes as China’s “various types of intelligent unmanned equipment.”

The use of robotic dogs (and, of course, small aerial drones) by the military is nothing new. A CCTV video from last year also highlighted China’s rifle-armed electronic dogs at a joint exercise of the Chinese, Cambodian, Laotian, Malaysian, Thai and Vietnamese armies held in China last November.

In 2020, the US Air Force demonstrated how it uses robotic dogs as a link in its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), which uses artificial intelligence and rapid data analysis to detect and counter threats to United States military assets

And since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, drones have become commonplace on battlefields, land, sea, and air, with cheap remote-controlled vehicles capable of destroying sophisticated military machines such as tanks and even warships.

The lethal capabilities of drones seen on Ukraine’s battlefields have proven to be the great equalizer, allowing military forces with smaller defense budgets to compete with significantly better armed and funded enemies.

China is one of the world’s top drone exporters, but last year its commerce ministry imposed export controls on drone technology, citing the need to “protect national security and interests.”

However, robotic dogs for the People’s Liberation Army seem to be getting a lot of publicity.

And dogs have been appearing on China’s highly regulated social media for at least a year.

According to the state-run Global Times newspaper, the presence of robotic dogs in exercises with foreign militaries indicates the advanced state of development.

“Generally, a new team is not brought into a joint exercise with another country, so the robot dogs must reach a certain level of technological maturity,” the Global Times quoted an unnamed expert as saying.