It’s no secret that numerous militaries are relying more on drones and other robotic vehicles, but the UK’s leadership has a particularly bold vision. As the Guardian reports, armed forces head General Sir Nick Carter told Sky News in an interview that he believed a quarter of the British Army could be robots by the 2030s. He was careful to stress that he wasn’t setting firm targets, but these automatons could serve at and near the front lines of a given conflict.

This wasn’t idle speculation. More money for robotic warfare was expected to play a key role in a five-year

“Imagine in the future, the Army deploying a swarm of hundreds or thousands of unmanned aerial systems,” Dr. Mike Kweon, program manager for the Army Research Laboratory's Versatile Tactical Power and Propulsion Essential Research Program, said in a press release. “Each of these systems has only roughly 26 minutes with the current battery technologies to conduct a flight mission and return to their home before they lose battery power, which means all of them could conceivably return at the same time to have their batteries replaced.”

Without the charging stations, soldiers would need to carry thousands of batteries on missions, which