‘Future warfare will see sophisticated combat robots fighting on land, in the air, at sea and in outer space, the head of Russia’s military hi-tech body has said, adding that the days of conventional soldiers on the battlefield are numbered.’

“I see a greater robotization [of war], in fact, future warfare will involve operators and machines, not soldiers shooting at each other on the battlefield,” Lieutenant General Andrey Grigoriev, head of the Advanced Research Foundation (ARF) – viewed as Russia’s analogue of DARPA – told RIA Novosti in an interview on Wednesday.

He noted that future warfare will be determined by unmanned combat systems: “It would be powerful robot units fighting on land, in the air, at sea as well as underwater and in outer space.”

Read more: War machine: Robots to replace soldiers in future, says Russian military’s technical chief