It is a highly classified system  based on sensors that monitor what is happening on the ground and provide warning in the event of a cavity discovery, but its full details may not be published.

“This is not based on ownership. We leave them their freedom.”

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?

There are real signs of a renaissance in electronic warfare. Now comes the hard part: translating new strategies and concepts into doctrine, requirements, and systems in the field.

Army soldiers are testing goggles with an image-recognition system that can automatically spot threats like tanks and warn the rest of the squad — or transmit the target data to a distant missile battery so they can take it out.

This kind of effort to get fighter-jock technology to ordinary grunts — who do most of the fighting and dying — has enjoyed some high-profile attention in the last 12 months. The efforts cover everything from developing a new, more powerful longer-range rifle to buying off-the-shelf quadcopters, from adding VR training simulations to eliminating tedious safety lectures.

Colin Clark climbs in and out of the V-280 at the Association of the US Army show, from cockpit to troop compartment, and gets a thorough briefing from Bell on what they’ve building, from engineering refined by a decade’s experience with the V-22 Osprey to sensor technology derived from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — except upgraded.

Three weeks ago, US Army experts traveled to the Negev Desert to watch a test of the latest, longest-range version of Rafael’s Spike missile. Fired from an Israeli AH-64 Apache, the same gunship used by US attack helicopter squadrons, the Spike NLOS struck a target 20 miles away — four times the range of the… Keep reading →

The Army is ready for unmanned vehicles but not yet for a completely unmanned convoy. The 2020 iteration is called Expedient Leader-Follower because the Army still wants a human soldier driving the lead vehicle, with up to nine autonomous trucks following in its trail. But Oshkosh and Robotic Research told me they could take the humans out altogether, if the Army wanted.