But the design faces an uphill climb in the halls of the Pentagon, military experts said. Russia's war in Ukraine has shown the promise and peril of tank technology in a modern battlefield. Military strategists worry how useful tanks might be in a potential war against China, the U.S. military's chief rival. Outfitting lethal machines with artificial intelligence also concerns military skeptics.

When robots go to war, they won't look like us. They'll take to the sky with rotors, or they'll cruise through the sea like bulky torpedoes. The Uran-9 is an unmanned ground combat vehicle, or a robot tank. It's the latest in a long line of war robots made by Russia, and like all of them, it hasn't seen combat yet. It features a machine gun, a 30mm cannon, and missiles.