Anduril handed a sergeant a drone that dies in the desert sun. Three other companies each took more than a hundred million dollars for headsets that flunked the same rock.
Sgt. Ramontez Bennett was doing his job at Fort Irwin in July. The thermometer hit 110. His Anduril drone was supposed to sit up there doing the watching. Instead it cooked and came down. “They gotta do something about it overheating,” he said. That’s a working man with a piece of equipment that quit on him. Beside him, a crew from Theiss UAV Solutions waited ten minutes for a battery to charge and another ten to get the aircraft off the ground. Ukrainian drone crews get that size of drone in the air in under a minute, and they do it because nobody made them stand around.
Servers cooked. Batteries died and wouldn’t take a charge. Soldiers wrung T-shirts out of ice water and draped them over antennas that had quit. That’s not a battlefield out there. That’s my shop on a bad August afternoon when the compressor goes — except when my compressor goes, there isn’t a hill on the other side of it with somebody behind it.
Because that’s the part that don’t sit right. One gust of wind and the drone is on the side of a mountain. Behind the peaks, the signal’s gone. A swarm of five turned back because three Black Hawks carrying senior officers wandered into the same patch of sky. The demonstration ran out of room because the brass was standing in it.
Now, I’ll say what worked, because fair is fair. Starlink gave Lt. Col. Shawn Scott real bandwidth. First time in nineteen years he could talk to a soldier across the base without raising a transmission pole. The command-and-control network cut mission planning time way down. AI targeting tools that would have eaten a room of analysts now run in hours. And the Army put startup hardware into sergeants’ hands in public and let them break it. Alex Miller, the chief technology officer to the chief of staff, called the exercise a way to “fact-check all the vendors that are coming to us.” That is the most honest thing the Army has said about its own modernization in a long time, and I’ll hand it to them straight.
But a network is not a fighting force. You don’t grade a unit on its intranet. And Scott’s phone call is the truest piece of this whole program, because it needed nothing from the defense industry at all. It was a satellite dish and a radio.
Here is where I want you to stand where I stood a minute. A hundred million dollars is a school. It’s a clinic. It’s the county road out past the river that washes out every spring and the county patches with what’s left. Redemption Springs runs on a budget that wouldn’t cover one headset — one — and that headset can’t survive a rock in July. Anduril, Theiss, and the three headset outfits walked off that desert carrying engineering notes: thermal management, launch time, ruggedization. Every serious drone builder outside our procurement system solved those problems years ago, at a fraction of the price, in countries that are actually at war. The Army didn’t discover those problems in July. It paid to be told about them. You don’t pay a man a hundred thousand dollars to tell you the brake pads are shot. You check the pads before you write the check.
Secretary Hegseth told the services to stop waiting for perfect and buy off the shelf, quick. That’s a sound instruction. It don’t do a man on a hot rock any good if the off-the-shelf gear quits on him.
Brig. Gen. Daniel Hibner, running the Joint Modernization Command, said it would be “a very dangerous time for us just to hand over everything to technology,” and that it’s “very much still a human endeavor.” Lt. Gen. Michael McCurry looked at the heat and said, “You take a piece of electronics and lay it out on a hot rock in 109 degree temperatures and try and make it work. We’re seeing some of that.” Both of those are true. Neither one is an answer, because nobody on the far side of that fight is wringing out T-shirts.
And the far side has been busy. Ukraine’s crews have turned the 700-mile front into a kill zone the size of a laboratory. In drills in Germany earlier this year, Ukrainian drone operators took out a simulated American armored brigade. Jonathan Rue, who spent his career pushing new technology into the Army and now watches it from the outside, said the plain thing: “The tech is moving so quickly that the U.S. military bureaucracy cannot keep up.”
So the Army did the honest thing and copied. A drone called Lucas, built on the pattern of an Iranian Shahed, runs ten to fifty-five thousand dollars a unit, because the Pentagon finally owns the design and farms the work out to a group of manufacturers who have to bid against each other. That’s the most honest number this service has published in twenty years. It is also an admission, whether anybody meant it as one or not, that the expensive way was the wrong way.
Eisenhower said it on the way out the door in 1961. Guard against unwarranted influence, sought or unsought, from the military-industrial complex, because the potential for it “exists and will persist.” A hundred-million-dollar headset that dies on a rock in the desert is what that unwarranted influence looks like when it finally has to meet the ground. Dan Driscoll, the Army secretary until September, called the place a “calcified bureaucracy” on his way out. The last time this service truly transformed was the 1980s, when it hauled itself out of Vietnam and built the force that rolled Saddam out of Kuwait. That cost real pain and honest money. Everything since has been run as a briefing — and the Army has held five press calls in the last few weeks to explain why the transformation is coming.
Col. Merkl is right that the battlefield is changing before our eyes. The July exercise answered the question that wasn’t on any briefing slide: who’s doing the changing here, the Army, or the outfits the Army buys from? Fort Irwin produced brochures and punch lists. It didn’t produce a force.
The soldiers out there did their job. The gear didn’t. And the men who took the money weren’t standing on the rock when it quit.