Foxholes are an old military image. The phrase compresses fear, proximity, and the elemental need for trust. As unmanned systems migrate from periphery to platoon, the question is not merely whether robots can clear a path or carry a load, but whether they can occupy the psychological space next to a human being and do what pets, buddies, and rituals have always done under fire: steady nerves, hold attention, and anchor morale.
Clinical and experimental research into companion robots offers a surprisingly relevant evidence base. Trials with Paro, the therapeutic seal robot widely used in eldercare research, demonstrate measurable psychosocial benefits. Randomized work in long term care found reductions in loneliness and increased social engagement among residents who interacted with Paro versus controls. Those findings were complemented by physiological measures in smaller pilots showing transient reductions in blood pressure and heart rate while people engaged with the robot. These results are important because they show both subjective and objective markers of calming in constrained, stressful environments.
Beyond geriatrics, controlled experiments and analog environments suggest that embodied, responsive agents can act as social catalysts. A systematic survey of two decades of research into emotions in human robot interaction synthesizes how people recognize, reciprocate, and project affective states onto robotic agents. The review highlights that emotional engagement is not a fragile illusion reserved for the cognitively impaired. Instead, anthropomorphism and empathetic responses are robust across ages and situations when the machine offers contingent, social behavior. That robustness matters for operational settings because it predicts that soldiers will sometimes treat fielded robots as more than tools.
The military field literature and qualitative interviews with warfighters supply vivid corroboration. Explosive ordnance disposal technicians and other robot operators routinely name machines, perform maintenance rituals, and, in reported cases, hold funerals or award symbolic honors to destroyed robots. Those behaviors are not evidence of delusion. They are, rather, culturally intelligible ways for teams to process risk, loss, and the obligations they feel toward artifacts that routinely take hazard away from human bodies. The critical operational question is how those bonds will shape split second choices on the battlefield. Will affection for a valued robot delay an evacuation? Will overattachment bias risk tradeoffs in ways that harm personnel or mission? The empirical literature does not answer those applied policy questions fully, but it establishes that the psychological substrate for strong attachment exists and is already active in deployed units.
Why do these bonds form so readily? The mechanisms are familiar to any student of social cognition. Humans bestow agency and intent on entities that move, react, and offer contingency. In high stress contexts agents that behave socially become anchors for attention and sources of comfort. Clinically, designers exploit those tendencies to reduce loneliness, facilitate conversation among isolated groups, and deliver simple behavioral interventions. Operationally, the very features that make a robot comforting in a tent or a base may complicate decisions in the field. A robot that solicits care by whirring, blinking, or returning to a handler can become a social object rather than a disposable tool.
Design choices matter. Recent ethical and legal discussion warns against making military robots overly humanlike precisely because increased human likeness magnifies emotional responses and can distort decision making. That is not a technological fetish. It is a pragmatic concern: form and behavior influence how soldiers categorize an object, how quickly they will abandon it under fire, and whether they will treat it instrumentally or sacramentally. To the extent warfighters must choose between saving a comrade and saving a machine, design that minimizes inappropriate anthropomorphic responses is a safety feature.
What should militaries, designers, and clinicians keep in mind if they intend to deploy companion-style agents near troops? First, treat social effects as part of the specification. Human factors research should be mandatory for any robot intended to be worn, slept beside, or shared in small units. Second, calibrate embodiment and behavior to mission needs. If a system must be disposable during high risk operations, resist cues that generate attachment. If a robot is intended for forward-deployed morale, explicitly design safeguards into protocols so that attachment does not create operational brittleness. Third, build training and doctrine that normalize the psychology. Naming a robot, joking about it, or giving it a persona can be adaptive coping. But units should be trained to recognize when coping crosses into compromised judgment.
Finally, integrate mental health professionals into prototype testing and field trials. Companion robots have demonstrated capacity to reduce loneliness and physiological markers of stress in clinical contexts. That same capacity can be an asset for isolated, sleep deprived, or rotary-deployed teams. But clinical benefit does not eliminate ethical cost. The soldier who mourns a robot is not merely anthropomorphizing; the soldier is operating inside a cultural system that ascribes value to objects that preserve human life. Responsibility falls to command, designers, and policy makers to ensure that those human responses do not become vectors of risk.
Robots in foxholes are not a future fantasy. The psychological literature as of now shows both promise and peril. We can design for resilience, or we can be surprised by attachments that reshape decisions under fire. The sensible path is deliberate empiricism: continue randomized and physiological studies in analog environments, expand qualitative work with operators, and fold ethical review into engineering cycles. If we do that, machines will not merely reduce casualties; they will fit into moral practices that preserve human judgment in the moment it matters most.