The Indian military has publicly unveiled its “homegrown” robot dog unit for the first time. However, this move, which was supposed to show the strength of military science and technology, unexpectedly triggered a wide range of public opinion disputes and became a public joke. What makes this technology show go in a different direction?
“Domestic” doubt: toy factory origins of “military equipment”.After an in-depth investigation, Indian netizens found that this batch of so-called “domestic” robot dogs were actually purchased from a toy factory in Guangdong, China. Through careful comparison, people found that these robot dogs and the factory’s toy products are almost identical. Further verification showed that these robot dogs, which were used for military purposes, were actually assembled from a toy chip remotely controlled from 15 meters away and a lead-acid battery from an electric bicycle.
It is reported that the Indian military procurement department for private gain, excessively low procurement prices, resulting in suppliers have to reduce equipment standards to control costs. This has triggered a strong discontent among the Indian public, who have accused the army of corruption and incompetence, seriously neglecting national security, and treating military equipment procurement as a game.
In fact, this is not the first time that the Indian military has made a joke on its robot dog project. As early as last year, India’s official website had launched a high-profile “Indian version of mechanical dog”, and claimed to build a modern unmanned combat force, Shouting “China can do I can” slogan. However, from the public video footage at the time, it can be seen that this “mechanical dog” action is rigid, the ability to cross obstacles is extremely limited, and the gap is far from China’s advanced robot dog equipment, and it has been a lot of ridicule by Indian netizens.
High-priced procurement: The question behind the huge expenditure, faced with the difficulties of independent research and development, India is trying to bridge the gap by buying Western equipment at high prices. Among them, India bought about 100 robot dogs from the US Ghost Robot company at a price of about 260 million yuan, with an average of 2.6 million yuan per dog. The price is much higher than comparable products on the market, raising questions about whether the procurement process is opaque.
In sharp contrast, the price of the same kind of high-performance combat robot dog in China is only about 20,000 yuan, even if equipped with a weapon system, the price is not more than 30,000 yuan. Such a huge cost difference, for large-scale unmanned combat platforms equipped with robots, will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the actual deployment and implementation of national defense capabilities.
Technical shortcomings: under the plight of intelligent helplessness, in addition to high procurement costs, India is also facing severe challenges in robot dog technology. As a high-tech product, the core of the robot dog is intelligent operation, covering a variety of complex functions such as reconnaissance, reconnaissance and actual combat. Although the United States has opened some basic technologies, key combat systems have not been made public. This makes India even if it buys high-end robot dogs, it can only achieve basic functions, and once it encounters personalized needs or unexpected situations, it is helpless. In addition, India’s own research and development and production capacity is weak, domestic robot dogs are still missing, the so-called “China can do I can”, but self-deceiving empty talk.
The Indian robot dog force storm not only exposed many problems in the military’s procurement and research and development process, but also sounded the alarm for its national defense construction. How to effectively improve the national defense capability while ensuring the quality of equipment and technical level will be an important issue that India needs to face in the future.
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