The Jerusalem Post and a limited number of other media outlets on Wednesday visited the Elbit-FUSE facility for building mass-scale robot and drone armies.
The visit was timed to coincide with Elbit-FUSE’s unveiling of a range of new and updated products, enabling small numbers of human soldiers to direct dozens or even hundreds of robots and drones to perform defensive and offensive functions in large-scale swarms.
Imagine hundreds of drones combining with dozens of tank-style autonomous vehicles and smaller tactical bat-shaped, dog-shaped, and otherwise specialized robots to defend a border or take over an enemy urban neighborhood.
The drones provide air cover, the autonomous tank-style vehicles provide tactical firepower, and the smaller robots enter structures where the enemy forces are hiding to defeat them up close or neutralize their booby traps without a single soldier setting foot in the neighborhood.
This is the vision Elbit-FUSE presented on Wednesday. The company did not enter this arena in a vacuum. Ukraine announced in July that it had reached a production rate of 10 million small tactical drones per year and was looking to double that volume.
Drones, autonomous weaponry increasingly defining global warfare
China, the United States, and others are all starting to mass-produce drones and robots in astronomically larger quantities than in the past.
In line with these developments, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir on Tuesday night announced that by Hanukkah (December), the IDF would have opened an entirely new branch to focus on robots, drones, and AI battle forces.
“Military forces are entering a new operational era in which combat effectiveness will increasingly depend not only on autonomous platforms themselves, but also on the ability to integrate and coordinate large numbers of autonomous systems within existing maneuver forces in real time,” Eyal Dahan, CEO of FUSE, said. FUSE is a recently developed Elbit unit focusing on these issues, having combined at least four other related entities into one.
“FUSE was established to deliver that capability today – combining autonomous platforms, operational AI, and scalable One2Many command capabilities into integrated operational solutions that can be rapidly deployed and integrated into modern combat formations,” Dahan explained.
Speaking at a private briefing on Wednesday, he explained that even mass swarms of robots and drones would not completely replace human soldiers.
Other Elbit officials clarified to the Post that, on defense, fewer human soldiers could be needed in general to manage the autonomous vehicle swarms.
In contrast, on attack, the officials explained that a larger number of soldiers could be required, depending on the mission.
As an ethical matter, Elbit officials said that humans would and must remain in the loop to sign off on targeting decisions and reduce collateral harm to civilians.
In that sense, the AI systems installed in Elbit’s myriad types of drones and robots, including extremely advanced sensors for distinguishing combatants from civilians, are still not the final line for approving an attack.
If an attack was in an area where few civilians and sensitive items were known to be in play, fewer human soldiers might need to be involved.
But if an attack was against a highly sensitive location or one where many civilians could be at risk if the strike was not precise, then more soldiers would be involved to analyze the situation, as currently occurs.
At the facility, the Post saw five different versions of the Firefox drone, with each version having different uses, abilities in day vs nighttime, and varying price ranges depending on whether a client-buyer seeks cheaper, less fancy machines or smarter, high-end ones.
Some drones might cost as little as $2,000, while others might be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Large variety of machines in production
The Post also saw FPV drones; drones disguised as items in nature, something which has been previously reported on; machines with shorter and longer range capabilities; and machines with laser-guided capabilities
In another section of the facility, the Post witnessed multiple stages of drone and robot assembly.
Some Elbit-FUSE technicians were assembling single parts, such as cameras or wings; others were meeting to discuss ongoing technical issues; and others were assembling all of the many parts of a drone or a robot.
Many dozens of robots and drones were already assembled on shelves, and many others were secured in special wrapping material for delivery.
There were special rooms for simulating intense wind environments, as well as others for handling special laser-related issues.
These laser-related issues are important but not as complex as those in a different Elbit facility that the Post visited in June, which is at the heart of Elbit’s most complex laser production.
FUSE has 160 employees, with 110 at the main facility which the Post visited, of whom around 65% are engineers, with many others being programmers or having other special skills, all at just one subsidiary of Elbit’s much larger operations.
Dahan emphasized that having many engineers available was critical to constantly updating each product, noting that one drone had been updated four times in the last three years to stay on the cutting edge of developing technologies.
A major focus of the FUSE product launch was its One2Many operational capabilities, which are powered by a unified AI operating system enabling centralized coordination of autonomous swarms and distributed aerial and ground formations at scale.
FUSE said that at the core of the portfolio is Dominion-X, “an AI-powered unified operating system enabling One2Many operations in GNSS-denied environments, supported by advanced automatic target recognition (ATR) and homing capabilities.”
It added that “Dominion-X enables centralized real-time coordination and management of autonomous aerial and ground systems, including real-time mission data exchange between platforms and distributed operations across battlefield environments through a shared mission network.”
Designed for contested and GPS-denied environments, FUSE’s solutions “support resilient mission execution, distributed autonomous operations, and manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T) alongside maneuvering forces and crewed platforms within existing military formations and command structures.”
FUSE said that it “delivers mature military-grade autonomous systems designed for scalable and resilient multi-domain operations, supported by Elbit Systems’ operational experience and high-volume manufacturing infrastructure.”
According to Dahan, FUSE’s solutions have accumulated more than 1,000,000 operational flight hours and over 100,000 autonomous ground operation hours, with thousands of platforms delivered worldwide.
Generally, FUSE’s products are focused on medium-to-longer range missions as opposed to competitors such as SpearUAV, an Israeli defense tech company based in Tel Aviv, which announced on Monday that it had close to 1,000 Viper 300 loitering munitions (LM) ready to deliver to customers around the world.
While Elbit-FUSE is focused first on Israel as a client, the US and many European countries remain strong customers.
Although there are large American and other foreign competitors in this field, Elbit-FUSE has shown that its products not only perform at a higher level product-to-product but also excel over many others in being able to connect the operations of swarms of products in the air and on the land simultaneously.
Dahan said that FUSE is also working on expanding into drone and robot swarm operations at sea.
It was previously reported that the Israeli navy has been operating autonomous sea vehicles in recent years, though it is unclear when operating swarms at sea will be ready to be rolled out.
Elbit Systems has already been among the Israeli companies developing such technologies, including its already publicized 12-meter Seagull autonomous surface vessel designed to patrol offshore infrastructure for up to four days. The Seagull “incorporates mine countermeasures (MCM), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), maritime security (MS), electronic warfare (EW), and other advanced systems and technologies.”