21.02.2022.
Assistant Minister of Defence participates in UMEX 2022 exhibition in UAE
At the invitation of the organizers, the delegation representing the Ministry of Defence has visited "Umex 2022", the largest exhibition of unmanned platforms and technologies in the Middle East, which is being held in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The event began with a conference in which the Assistant Minister of Defence for Material Resources, Nenad Miloradović, PhD, participated as a panellist and spoke about unmanned platforms and technologies.
The conference was dedicated to the challenges, trends and risks of using unmanned platforms in sea, land, air and space operations, and Assistant Minister Miloradović gave a presentation entitled "Unmanned Systems and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: How Technology Shapes the Future Capabilities".
The panellists touched upon the technological, operational and ethical aspects of the use of unmanned platforms. Among other things, Assistant Minister Miloradović spoke about the current developmental directions and conceptual considerations regarding the use of such systems in the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces.- Unmanned/robotic combat systems that are currently being developed can be divided into two broad categories, in terms of their functional specifications and technologies used. The first category includes small, light, simple robotic combat systems suitable for cheap, mass production. These systems that can be used in “swarms” are designed to defeat enemy defences not thanks to their individual qualities, but by way of mass attack involving artificial intelligence-controlled coordinated movement of a large number of units. The Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Serbia is planning to focus on the development and production of such systems in the near future - said Assistant Minister Miloradović.
The second category, he said, includes unmanned/robotic combat systems that imitate the behaviour of a "human warrior" or manned combat platforms and that will operate jointly with formations of manned combat systems that will control them, but will have the necessary level of autonomy.
- Therefore, they must have a much higher degree of individual combat abilities and must be well protected, highly mobile and armed with next generation weapon packages in order to be superior to similar enemy systems. The Republic of Serbia has already made certain steps in that direction by developing and putting into use the series of "Mali Miloš" unmanned/robotic combat vehicles - said Assistant Minister Miloradović.
According to him, the aim is to integrate this category of unmanned/robotic combat systems with artificial intelligence in the future to the extent necessary for them to operate, and artificial intelligence will certainly be used for command and information systems at all tactical levels, which will ensure getting the most out of future, and even current, combat formations equipped with a combination of manned and unmanned combat systems and a multiple increase in the overall combat capabilities of the armed forces as a whole.- The Ministry of Defence and our research centres are trying to develop future systems and concepts in parallel, but also to draw on experiences from recent conflicts and to use a commonsense approach to any future solutions - said Assistant Minister Nenad Miloradović in his presentation.
Captain Michael Brasseur, the first commodore of the U.S. Navy’s Task Force 59, an experimental unit armed exclusively with maritime and robotic systems, Professor Oussama Khatib, director of Stanford Robotics Lab and Professor Lakmal Seneviratne, director of the Khalifa University Centre for Autonomous Robotic Systems, and former director of the Centre for Robotics Research, King’s College, London, also participated in the panel. The panel discussion was moderated by John Nicholson Jr., a retired United States Army four-star general, former commander of U.S. Forces – Afghanistan, now Lockheed Martin chief executive for Middle East.
Continuing the long-standing partnership and cooperation with the United Arab Emirates and this country’s defence industry companies, the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Serbia is one of 26 delegations at the "UMEX 2022", the fifth unmanned systems exhibition, where 134 companies are exhibiting this year.
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