ENEMY FAUNA
INFANTRYMAN'S GUIDE TO COMBATING MODERN AUTONOMOUS PLATFORMS2nd editionKen Moore & Yelena IvanovnaOctober 2272
FOREWORD
War changes.
This is neither a new observation nor a particularly useful one by itself. Weapons change. Tactics change. Organisations change. What is useful to remember is that these changes rarely occur independently.
The increasing use of autonomous platforms has altered the relationship between the soldier and the battlefield. Machines can remain where people cannot, observe for longer than people can, carry more than people can, and in many circumstances make decisions without waiting for a person to make them. Their introduction has consequently changed not only what is deployed, but what must be expected in return.
An effective platform invites a response. A successful response invites an adaptation. An adaptation becomes a new platform, a new procedure, or a new weakness to be exploited. This process is continuous. By the time a particular machine becomes familiar to an infantryman, its newest variant may already be appearing elsewhere.
The result is a constant exchange of information and capability between opposing forces.
For the individual soldier, however, this exchange is rarely visible in its entirety. A soldier does not need to know the history of a platform, the organisation that designed it, or the engineering principles behind its operation. They need to know what is in front of them.
What is it?
Why is it here?
What is it likely to do?
What should I do about it?
Enemy Fauna was written for that purpose.
This guide is not intended to replace technical manuals, intelligence publications, or unit-specific training. It is deliberately narrower. The information presented here has been selected for immediate recognition and practical use by personnel who may encounter autonomous platforms under field conditions.
The descriptions are therefore brief. Many of the machines included in this guide are considerably more complicated than their entries suggest. This is intentional. Knowing how a platform works is not the same as knowing how to deal with it.
Think of this book as a dictionary.
Modern combat has developed its own vocabulary of machines, behaviours, configurations and responses. The soldier who recognises that vocabulary can understand more of what is happening around them. A machine encountered in an unexpected location, carrying unfamiliar equipment, or behaving outside its normal pattern is still communicating something. So is the absence of a machine that should be there.
The purpose of this guide is to make that language easier to read.
No field guide remains current forever. Autonomous platforms are particularly poor subjects for permanent classification, since every successful design is an invitation to modification and every successful countermeasure is an invitation to redesign. Readers are encouraged to report significant variations through the appropriate channels. Future editions will depend upon these observations.
Observe carefully. Identify before acting where circumstances permit. Do not assume that a familiar machine is an unchanged machine.
And remember that the fauna of a battlefield is always evolving.
Ken Moore
Yelena Ivanovna
