🪖 US Army's AI warfare ambitions crumble in desert training

As rumors speculate about a potential resumption of US-Iran hostilities, a recent WSJ report depicts hard-hitting results from the latest major US military training meant to demonstrate its battle readiness.

The US Army staged a major exercise at Fort Irwin in July to demonstrate what it calls an AI-enabled battlefield, bringing 9,700 soldiers to the Mojave Desert for a mock fight against a unit standing in for China's army.

However, some of the equipment meant to represent the future of warfare failed when it mattered most.

➡️ Drones from Anduril and Theiss UAV Solutions either landed because of overheating or took ten minutes to get airborne, while spending only half their maximum flight time in the air to conserve battery

➡️ Wind gusts threw drones off course, and signals were lost behind the mountains

➡️ The augmented-reality headsets, on which three companies hold contracts worth more than $100 million each, showed deficiencies, and the army is uncertain whether it will move forward with them

As a result, the exercises mostly boiled down to training soldiers to clear buildings — a picture of outdated warfare and hardly what the American command expected to see.

The structural problems run deep

🔴 Congressional probes and government oversight reports have found the army wasted billions on fumbled weapons programs, inadequate training, and failures in cybersecurity. New tech from startups, most of which has never been tested in war, has proven too fragile for real-world conditions

🔴 Ousted Army Secretary Dan Driscoll described the current US Army as a "calcified bureaucracy," where the military cannot keep up with the pace of technological development

The last major transformation inside the Pentagon came in the 1980s, when the service pivoted from Vietnam and built the force it would use in the Gulf War. If the US military struggles to implement the newest technologies in ideal test conditions, what happens when it faces an adversary that has already mastered mass drone warfare? Iran offers a preview. Over the past year, Iranian drone and missile strikes have successfully targeted US bases across the Middle East — in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, and the UAE — forcing the Pentagon to withdraw forces from several of them.

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