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In the face of rapid technological change and the creation of ambitious military modernisation programmes, this paper argues that land forces, in managing the relationship between force levels and the adoption of military robotics, must recognise that there are inherent limits to techno-centric force reduction efforts and realise the inefficacy of substituting skilled soldiers with robots. It begins with an overview of how the proper integration of robotics into a military's force structure can improve capability, save lives and potentially reduce costs, but suggests that common accounts of robot utility are exaggerated and endanger the risk assessment processes governing the adoption of said technologies and relevant personnel settings. The paper explores the limits of robotic solutions to military problems, discussing their technical limitations, redundancy and related issues that, when combined with a technico-moral skills degradation problem also detailed within, point to the need to reshape force structures to suit the adoption of robotics while preserving existing levels of human staffing.

Hybrid military teams, formed by human warfighters and autonomous artificial agents, represent the technological future of Defence operations. Both the potential and the inherent limitations of current technology are well-known, but the cognitive–behavioral and motivational aspects of human–robot interaction on the battlefield have yet to be systematically investigated. To lay the theoretical and methodological foundation of this scientific investigation, our position paper critically examines how the military personnel's spontaneous tendency to anthropomorphize artificial autonomous agents can affect operations of hybrid military teams in multiple ways. We will argue that the psychological impact of anthropomorphism on military personnel is neither easily avoidable nor necessarily detrimental. Correctly identifying the multi-level cognitive mechanisms that underpin implicit and explicit forms of anthropomorphism allows us to increase the efficacy of human–agent interaction. We will argue that, within hybrid teams, the capability to communicate with teammates, allies, civilians, and adversaries relies on embodied social cognition processes that are inherently geared toward anthropomorphism and leverage its effects. By updating both the design of autonomous artificial agents and the training of human troops to account for these processes, their reciprocal coordination can be augmented.