FORT IRWIN, Calif. — Looking like a toy helicopter, a small black drone rose up over a cluster of adobe buildings in a quiet desert village, emitting a faint buzz.
The drone, an Anduril Industries’ Ghost-X, paused after which rose higher, disappearing into the clouds. One other followed.
Seemingly small and unthreatening, the drones were serving because the eyes of an infantry company concealed by the encompassing mountains and readying to reclaim a village held by the enemy.
And people drones weren’t alone.
, an awesome group of air- and ground-based machine fighters burst onto the scene. An “octocopter” lumbered through the sky with precision munitions and other robots attached to its belly, dropping three 60mm mortar rounds on a roof and other small, hand-held, cylindrical “throwbots” on the bottom.
Robotic combat vehicles rolled into view, armed with .50-caliber and M240 machine guns, firing on enemy positions and providing cover for troops maneuvering into the village.
Meanwhile, a four-legged dog robot stepped out from a thick cloud of smoke, giving the soldiers monitoring from afar one other view.
The scene was the culmination of a U.S. Army effort to know how it could use human and machines together on the battlefield. Service leaders descended on Fort Irwin, California — home to the National Training Center — in March for a big exercise often known as Project Convergence.
The demonstration was a glimpse of the Army’s future, in accordance with top officials. Gen. James Rainey, who leads Army Futures Command, expects the service’s future force to be so integrated with machines that humans will face a much lower risk.
“We are going to never again trade blood for first contact,” he continuously says, promising to deploy robots as an alternative.
But getting these formations right won’t be easy, leaders acknowledge. For human-machine integration to work, a functional and user-friendly network must underpin it, it requires protection from cyberattacks, and the systems will need to have the best amount of autonomy.
Leaders also say it’s not technology that can prove essentially the most difficult factor, but moderately breaking from antiquated acquisition processes that prevent rapid purchases and decelerate deliveries to soldiers.
“The pace of the threat and the pace of technology — the evolution is way faster, and there’s no way that we’re going to succeed if we proceed to amass technology and even decide to develop” it at the same old pace, Joseph Welch, the Army’s C5ISR Center director, said on the March event.
Forward progress
The Project Convergence exercise followed months of effort focused on integrating humans and machines into service formations. It was a likelihood to see what works and what doesn’t because the Army prepares for a fight against adversaries with advanced capabilities.
The service insists it’s now able to move forward with human-machine integrated formations.
The fiscal 2025 budget request marks the primary time the Army has included funding for these formations, also called H-MIF. It’s looking for $33 million for step one, which provides an initial human-machine integration capability to infantry and armor formations. The Army was experimenting with each at Project Convergence.
The service wants machines in these latest formations to “offload risk” and supply soldiers with “additional information for decision making,” in accordance with the service’s budget documents.
The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office is spearheading the hassle for Futures Command. The office is creating prototypes using existing air and ground robotic programs and payloads while incorporating common architecture, communications and network capabilities.
The FY25 funding, the Army has said, will fund the movement of concepts through prototyping in addition to enable soldiers to judge them in exercises and experiments.
On the Project Convergence event, the Army flooded the battlefield with robots, sensors and other machines meant to assist soldiers in complex flights. The experiment included air and ground robots with reconfigurable payloads, tethered drones, counter-drone systems, and a ventriloquist decoy emitter that emulates radio frequency traffic to confuse the enemy.
The service used greater than 240 pieces of technology, including capabilities from allied militaries within the U.K., Canada, Australia, France and Japan.
The pressure to remodel
The choice to rely more on robots isn’t a selection, in accordance with Alexander Miller, who’s now serving as chief technology officer to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George.
George and Miller each watched the experiment in March; Miller carried a cellphone with an app demonstrating the Army’s latest Tactical Assault Kit. The app superimposes the situation of soldiers and robots in addition to enemy positions in real time.
The service knows it has to do that, or “we are going to fall radically behind,” Miller said of human-machine integration. “There are bad people who find themselves willing to make use of robotics, and if we don’t figure it out we will probably be behind the curve, we are going to put men and girls in harm’s way.”
Integrating robots into formations can also be accelerating because “there was a cultural shift,” Miller said. “It’s been 12-18 months where we’ve got stopped treating robots as a one-for-one augmentation for soldiers and began saying: ‘What are the dull, dirty, dangerous, disruptive things that robots can really try this are usually not just combat power? How will we augment them without taking a single rifleman off or multiple riflemen off the road to manage a robot?’ ”
On the March experiment, for example, the Army sent a ground robot with a mine-clearing line charge to deploy along enemy lines. Because it fights the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian military is using these to disarm enemy minefields and trenches, but transporting them in crewed vehicles.
On the experiment, the robot shot the road charge out of a small launcher. The road didn’t explode as intended.
Army leaders said glitches are common and making this work would offer a much safer way for soldiers to clear mine fields.
Also enabling latest models for human-machine integration is the progress of business technology, in accordance with Welch. “That has accelerated tremendously across many alternative technical domains,” he said.
Artificial intelligence is getting smarter; sensors are getting smaller, lighter and more versatile; connectivity solutions are more abundant; and air-, ground- and space-based capabilities are easier to make use of.
Obstacles ahead
Army leaders acknowledge there may be loads of work ahead to integrate robots and soldiers on the battlefield. The experiment itself illustrated “just how complicated it’s going to be … where we actually proliferate lower-cost, cheaper options and we clutter the environment intentionally,” Miller said.
At one point during Project Convergence, the Army jammed itself, causing a friendly drone swarm to fall out of the sky. The service fixed the issue by turning on a capability allowing smart routing management for its Wi-Fi, Miller said.
Beyond technical challenges, George said, the Army must persuade Congress to change the procurement process so the service can acquire or adapt capabilities inside broader funding lines. The goal, he explained, is to be more aware of what’s working for soldiers and to in a position to rapidly buy small amounts of that equipment.
He said he’s working with Congress “in order that we are able to move money slightly bit.”
“We wish and want the oversight, [but] it’s a matter of how we return to them and tell them, ‘Here’s what we’re going to purchase inside that funding line, and here’s how we’re doing it,’ and get feedback,” George added.
Indeed, one focus is on marking sure the Army can change systems with no need reprogramming authorization or latest funding.
The technical and operational ways the Army goes to employ human-machine integrated formations today “doesn’t mean that’s how we’re going to employ it two years from now,” said Mark Kitz, the service’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical.
“We don’t historically treat robotics as a software program. It’s really a software program,” Kitz explained. “So how will we use a few of our unique acquisition authorities then to construct that flexibility upfront?”
Miller said one other potential obstacle is ensuring sufficient U.S. production of components.
“We now have to have components which might be approved and valid and we aren’t scared to employ because they were made by an adversary,” he said. Welch noted the Army is working with U.S. government labs to handle a few of the component concerns.
The service can also be working internally to revamp its approach to finding capabilities.
“There’s a much tighter coupling … not only externally with our industry partners and other key stakeholders, whether it’s over on [Capitol] Hill or up in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], but in addition internally,” said Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army’s deputy chief of staff in command of command, control, communications, cyber operations and networks. “We’ve got requirements with acquisition, with testers, and so they’re all centered around soldiers, getting that direct feedback.”
Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow on the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank where he focuses on wargaming, said he’s “optimistic” about human-machine integration but that it might take longer than the service expects.
“Most individuals overestimate the speed at which you’ll be able to develop latest concepts of employment around even proven engineering,” he said. “It often takes years outside of a serious war to construct entirely latest formations and structures.”
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.