PLA plans unmanned battle tanks, vehicles

Chinese military has started research on developing unmanned armoured vehicles including battle tanks for deployment in future battles as part of an ambitious plan to modernise its defences.

“Unmanned ground vehicles will play a very important role in future ground combat. Realising that, we have begun to explore how to refit our armoured vehicles into unmanned ones,” Major-General Xu Hang, president of the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Armoured Forces Engineering in Beijing, was quoted as saying in the official media here on Wednesday.

“Though we have yet to develop unmanned tanks, I think it is an irreversible trend that computers will gradually replace humans to control those fighting machines,” he said while conducting demonstration of an unmanned battle tank and other vehicles.

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