The experimental turret will use the technology — and the safeguards — from the Army’s ATLAS project, originally misrepresented in the media as building “killer robots.”

Alarming headlines to the contrary, the US Army isn’t building robotic “killing machines.” What they really want artificial intelligence to do in combat is much more interesting.

Will high-tech hardware developed to protect aircraft translate to the mud and dust of ground combat?

If RAVEN succeeds in the next, more challenging round of tests, the BAE jammer will ultimately go on the 1980s-vintage M2 Bradley. That’s a big part of the Army’s urgent push to protect American armored vehicles against Russian-made anti-tank missiles in widespread use around the world.

For Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, when the organization he’s led for 31 months changed its name, its mission, and the four-star headquarters it works for, it finally found the answer to a question it – and the entire Army – have been struggling with for at least 16 years.

“Ultimately that is what this is all about, why I get up every morning, that’s why AFC exists: to make sure, not today’s soldier, but our kids and our grandkids have the core concepts, the organizational structures, and the capabilities they need to fight and win on a future battlefield,” Gen. Murray said, “or even better yet not to fight at all, because there is nobody in the world in the future that would ever take on the United States in ground combat, because we have done our job so well.”

“We’ve done concepts for many years and, frankly, the Army hasn’t changed much,” admitted the three-star chief of the Army’s in-house think tank on future war. But on Friday, when the Army officially put its futurists under the same roof as its scientists, engineers, and program managers, the notoriously hidebound service aimed to break down the barrier between thinking about the future force and building it.