Soldiers flew drones at half the maximum flight time to conserve batteries
The U.S. Army brought 9,700 infantry soldiers to the Mojave Desert in July for Project Convergence, a 10-day exercise in which troops fought a unit called Blackhorse standing in for China’s People’s Liberation Army. In many of the moments meant to spotlight advanced technology, however, newly procured drones and developmental communications systems failed to perform as intended. Soldiers flew the drones during limited windows and at roughly half the maximum flight time to conserve battery life and avoid losing them, operating without full autonomy or any AI to assist. Chinese consumer drones could do the manual job a decade ago.
The battle still offered the familiar scene of legacy warfare: green-suited soldiers kicking in doors, screaming above gunfire, weighed down with weapons from the last century.
The Mojave heat was a recurring problem. With the thermometer climbing toward 110 degrees, servers overheated, batteries died and could not be recharged, and soldiers drenched T-shirts in ice water and draped them over antennas that were on the fritz.
Sgt. Ramontez Bennett’s drone from Anduril Industries was supposed to loiter above the action; instead, the relentless glare forced it to land. “They gotta do something about it overheating,” Bennett said. Plenty of America’s conflicts have played out in temperatures rivaling that particular July day.
Wind complicated matters. “All it takes is one gust of wind and it’s on the side of a mountain,” Bennett said. Behind the rugged peaks, drones lost their signal.
Next to Bennett, another pilot prepared to launch a drone from Theiss UAV Solutions. After a prolonged wait to charge a drained battery, the aircraft took about 10 minutes to get airborne. Ukrainian soldiers can get a drone of about the same size off the ground in under a minute. Theiss UAV founder Shawn Theiss said his drones typically launch within three minutes and that he received mostly positive feedback from soldiers at the exercise. Delays sometimes stem from inadequate soldier training or from glitches in communications parts made by a separate company, he said. The Theiss UAV drones at the exercise were more than three years old, and batteries may not have been at peak performance, Theiss added.
An Anduril spokesman said the company’s drone overheated and noted it had previously been tested in hot and cold temperatures. Following soldiers’ feedback, the company has prioritized upgrades to improve performance in extreme environments, the spokesman said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last year issued a directive to transform the Army into an AI-powered force equipped with drones and 3-D printers. He instructed the Defense Department to stop looking for technological perfection and instead buy off-the-shelf products that are “good enough,” stressing the urgency of modernizing, and directed the service to buy more software and startup technology.
Some of those investments, some dating to the Biden administration, have begun to change how the U.S. fights. In the war with Iran, which has relied largely on older and expensive systems, U.S. forces used an unmanned boat built by defense startup Saronic to rescue a stranded helicopter crew. A drone modeled on Iran’s Shahed, called Lucas, has been among the military’s most successful low-cost offensive weapons, costing between $10,000 and $55,000 per unit through an arrangement in which the Pentagon owns the design and farms out production to a group of manufacturers. Starlink connectivity has allowed Lt. Col. Shawn Scott, for the first time in his 19-year Army career, to radio a soldier sitting in an air-conditioned operations center at another end of the base without cumbersome transmission poles. New data-sharing technology has cut by two-thirds the time it takes Scott to plan and communicate missions.
Artificial-intelligence tools have also greatly accelerated intelligence analysis and target selection. The rapid evolution of the fighting in Ukraine shows how central such technologies will be to future wars.
Soldiers remain far from reaping the full benefits of cutting-edge autonomous weapons and AI systems, current and former national-security officials said, because the U.S. military has not been forced by necessity to modernize as quickly as Ukraine’s forces have in the heat of active conflict. Transforming a land-based fighting force with a history of slow technological adaptation into a nimble organization that exploits new innovations has been difficult.
“There is a recognition that the battlefield is changing before our eyes,” Col. Gregory Merkl told reporters on a recent press call. “We are absolutely dedicated to transformation.”
Startups’ emerging technology, most of which has never been to war, has at times proven too brittle for real-world applications, soldiers said. The Army is also still upgrading battlefield connectivity and communications, steps that are essential for capitalizing fully on next-generation weaponry. The next step is bolstering the reliability of communications and data integration systems so AI-powered weaponry can actually help human fighters out in remote and austere conditions. The exercise was designed to let specific units experiment with drones during pockets of fighting and learn about the technology — not to flood the airspace with autonomous weapons, an Army spokesman for Project Convergence said. The event was meant to “fact-check all the vendors that are coming to us” about the veracity of their sales pitches, said Alex Miller, chief technology officer to the Army’s chief of staff. While much of the technology had already won sizable Army contracts, officials and soldiers involved described it as experimental rather than essential new weaponry.
The Army found during the exercise that the augmented-reality headsets referenced in its media invitation to Fort Irwin showed deficiencies, and the service is uncertain whether it would move forward with them, a senior defense official at the training event said. Three companies have won contracts each worth more than $100 million to build the headsets. “You take a piece of electronics and lay it out on a hot rock in 109 degree temperatures and try and make it work,” said Lt. Gen. Michael McCurry, one of the senior Army leaders running the event. “We’re seeing some of that.”
“The tech is moving so quickly that the U.S. military bureaucracy cannot keep up,” said Jonathan Rue, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who played a key role in getting new technology into the Army and is now a partner at MVP Ventures.
The last major Army transformation came in the 1980s, when the service pivoted from Vietnam and built the force it would use in the Gulf War — retraining, reorganizing and fielding armored fighting vehicles, attack helicopters and modern air defense systems. The struggle now is to transform what recently ousted Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has called a “calcified bureaucracy” in preparation for a technologically sophisticated adversary in China. Driscoll departed in September following disagreements with Hegseth.
Daniel Goure, a former military analyst with the Lexington Institute who has held numerous war college teaching positions and Defense Department roles, said the Army’s history of modernization efforts is “almost unblemished by success.” He attributes the pattern to a tradition of risk aversion and a hierarchical organization.
Congress has long pressed the Army to modernize. Congressional probes and government oversight reports have found that the service has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on fumbled new weapons programs and has suffered from inadequate training and failures in cybersecurity and data management. The Ukraine war brought the inadequacies into focus, putting fully autonomous warfare on the battlefield with a technical proficiency that has at times humbled the U.S. During battlefield drills held in Germany earlier this year, Ukraine’s drone operators took out a U.S. armored brigade.
Upgrades such as the Army’s Next-Generation Command and Control system, used for AI-enabled planning and logistics, are a start. The system, with a $4 billion price tag in this year’s budget, allows troops to move faster and in a more dispersed fashion over longer stretches of battlefield — a capability that officials say is essential in modern conflicts.
The exercise at Fort Irwin climaxed with a predawn attack on a fabricated city, Razish, a relic of training for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stryker armored combat vehicles rolled down the hills. Smoke trucks attempted to obscure the view. Mortar rounds exploded, and soldiers moved from one building to the next, firing blank bullets and pausing for the occasional smoke break. A swarm of five small drones was forced to turn back as three Black Hawk helicopters carrying senior Army officials flew into the same airspace, squandering a rare high-tech moment the visitors had come to see.
“It’d be a very dangerous time for us just to hand over everything to technology,” said Brig. Gen. Daniel Hibner, commander of the Army’s Joint Modernization Command. “It’s very much still a human endeavor.”
Some defense officials said the efforts would bear fruit longer term despite near-term stumbles.