The Army is investing heavily in a strategy that will team soldiers with autonomous drones on the battlefield, with the goal of leveraging next-generation technology to save American lives, the U.S. Army’s chief technology officer said in an exclusive interview.
The service is searching for ways to fundamentally change how soldiers fight and win future wars. At the heart of that is a push for replaceable, smart technology — such as autonomous robots — to move ahead of human soldiers in the most dangerous situations. Army CTO Alex Miller said the Army’s top priorities include developing drone technology for overcoming battlefield obstacles, resupplying troops under attack, and evacuating wounded soldiers from the front lines.
Mr. Miller told the Threat Status weekly podcast that the Army is completely changing the way it approaches those missions. The objective, he said, is to make the Army as a whole faster and more effective, rather than just giving soldiers more tools.
“What we’re doing is taking a step back and going, ‘What’s the best way to do that now with the technology that’s available?’ Maybe it’s robots actually going up there,” Mr. Miller said. “So that the first thing that the enemy sees is not American soldiers, it’s American technology.”
The shift to autonomous systems represents a major cultural change for the Army. New technologies — from communications equipment to classified intelligence tools — are now required to integrate artificial intelligence and software into the designs of systems and tools the service relies on.
Mr. Miller pointed to breaching — the complex and dangerous task of pushing through mines, razor wire, and sometimes large earthen berms built up as an obstacle to slow down troops — as an example.
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“Any robot can do breaching if you run over a mine. That’s not the intent that we’re trying to go over or trying to achieve,” Mr. Miller said. “Having soldiers that have to walk and carry rucksacks and carry rifles, what does it mean to actually support them in a meaningful way? Not some of the gamey ways that we’ve seen where it’s just a robot with eight wheels that’s driving along.”
The Army’s approach to breaching hasn’t changed in a meaningful way since the late 1980s, with the introduction of the Mine Clearing Line Charge, which is essentially a metal cable with explosive charges meant to detonate a clear path for soldiers — or “breaching” the obstacle in military parlance.
A recent demonstration with the Army tested this exact process augmented with an autonomous ground vehicle made by Overland AI. During the demonstration, a version of the company’s uncrewed Ripsaw M5 vehicle towed a trailer with the mine-clearing charge up to an obstacle.
As a quadcopter drone overhead spread smoke to obscure an earthen berm with concrete barriers in front of it, the trailer angled up and fired the cable charge to blast a path.
All of that happened without a soldier in the vehicle to experience the dangerous shockwave of the explosives, or be exposed to a hypothetical enemy threat. It’s an example of what Overland AI called a “human-machine integrated formation.”
“Demand for ground autonomy has moved decisively from experimentation to operational integration,” said Stephanie Bonk, the company’s co-founder and president. “We are training warfighters directly and incorporating continuous feedback to ensure our systems perform in real-world conditions, while building the trust required for operational use.”
The Army’s ’weekly spin cycles’
That approach is exactly what the Army is looking for, Mr. Miller said. But it requires getting technology out of development facilities and into the hands of soldiers during training. Mr. Miller said that is now happening routinely.
During a recent training event in the California desert, Mr. Miller saw units with the 1st Cavalry Division “not only using drones in new and novel ways” but also able to print replacement drone frames quickly when one would break.
That level of integration is a complete change from the Army’s past.
“There would have been a whole process where something breaks, they have to file a report, they have to call someone back at their headquarters to get something new,” Mr. Miller told the Threat Status weekly podcast. “It was a much more rigorous process.”
The adoption of new tech has started what Mr. Miller described as “weekly spin cycles,” saying that the Army is acting more and more like “a company that wants to stay current.”
That includes using older systems in new ways. There are examples of the Army loading completely new software onto vehicle computers designed decades ago, modernizing the way soldiers can use them without paying for an entirely new piece of equipment. But it also means updating critical things that have lagged behind.
Mr. Miller said that the Army is “adding new radios, changing the way those radios work,” and “totally revamping those architectures” that were still relying on technology developed decades ago.
“A lot of the barriers that we at the Army used to have to deal with upwards have been removed,” Mr. Miller said.
He credited Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s drive for purchasing process reforms.
“Now, we’re able to own our own destiny much more fluidly,” he said.
The Army’s new approach represents more than just a few pieces of new technology. Mr. Miller said it’s a fundamental change to how American soldiers think about the tools they use to fight.
The shift is already happening across multiple army formations, with industry sources and defense officials telling The Washington Times that testing of new technology is happening in the 82nd Airborne Division, the 25th Infantry Division, the 4th Infantry Division and the 36th Engineer Brigade.
All across the country and the Army, soldiers are testing new systems to see if they can keep up with the demands of the force.
This combination of real-world testing and development with rapid prototyping and adoption — measured in weeks, instead of years — isn’t a science fiction future. Soldiers are, according to Mr. Miller and others, driving innovations meant for the battlefield America may find itself on in the very near future.
The Army’s goal, Mr. Miller said, is to maintain the U.S. advantage with defense technology, ensuring that in the most dangerous situations that pose the greatest risk on the battlefield U.S. adversaries are met with replaceable tools — not human soldiers.
“We’re not putting soldiers as the first line,” Mr. Miller said. “We’re trading blood for steel and it’s steel on our side and blood on their side.”
• John T. Seward can be reached at jseward@washingtontimes.com.
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