The Defense Advanced Research Agency has been developing its Digital Radio Frequency Battlespace Emulator, or DRBE, since 2019 with the goal of helping improve the Defense Department’s ability to test new electronic warfare capabilities or provide realistic EW effects like radar jamming and spoofing.

The system uses a real-time high-performance computing architecture to reduce latency and provide more realistic RF simulation, according to program manager Anna Tauke-Pedretti.

In an interview with Defense News, Tauke-Pedretti said DRBE provides an option for DOD testers that lets them better tailor test events to specific scenarios or needs.

“We’re able to test systems under more controlled and varying scenarios,” she said. “We can choose what we test against and what our environment looks like so we can better understand how our systems respond in certain environments.”

EW simulation is a challenge for the DOD today — both in the lab and on live flight ranges. Labs often struggle to provide a realistic simulation, and open-air ranges are in high demand and the testing itself is complex and expensive. Tauke-Pedretti said DRBE is designed to tackle these concerns and make it easier for the military services to access high-fidelity testing.

The system itself takes up a few server racks, and Tauke-Pedretti said it doesn’t have major space constraints, which makes integrating DRBE fairly straightforward. She noted, however, that its power and cooling needs do require additional infrastructure.

DARPA’s primary DOD partner for DRBE has been the Navy, and the program plans to transition the system to a service lab to start using the system operationally later this year. Tauke-Pedretti said other Pentagon agencies have shown interest in the system and DARPA is “actively exploring” options for integrating DRBE in other lab environments.

As the program prepares to hand over the initial system, Tauke-Pedretti said her office is already thinking about what the next generation of this capability could look like. That means increasing the number of systems that connect to DRBE, growing the size of the simulation and expanding its compute power.

At the heart of that expansion is an optical interconnect technology that will increase the system’s bandwidth and connect more systems with lower latency. That could allow DRBE to support new missions, like battlespace autonomy, digital modeling and materials science.

“DRBE isn’t just a test tool; it has the potential to be a strategic enabler for next-generation defense technologies,” Tauke-Pedretti said. “By pushing the boundaries of real-time emulation and compute, we’re laying the groundwork for smarter, faster, and more resilient EW systems.”

The five companies brought drones and radio prototypes to a range near the U.S. Army’s Fort Wainright to see how they’d fare against simulated electronic warfare systems looking to jam their navigation and command-and-control capabilities. DIU was assessing whether any of them were ready to transition to the military services for further development or fielding.

With a few exceptions, the lack of field testing showed. While several companies made progress by the end of the four-day test event, they struggled initially to maintain targets and navigate flight routes. Some of that was due to jamming and some of it was because their technology wasn’t as mature as expected.

That outcome is not unusual for a prototype demonstration, DIU officials told Defense News during the event. In fact, the government team in Alaska wanted to see how the companies responded when the systems failed and whether they could iterate and come back the next day with a better solution.

That process is vital for both the DOD and the companies, but most small, commercial firms don’t have access to test space where they can learn and refine their products under the types of conditions they might face in the field. That’s a problem for the Defense Department, whose leaders want to field technology — and drones in particular — from a broader pool of companies and at faster rates.

DIU’s Trent Emeneker, who leads several autonomy projects for the organization and helped facilitate the Alaska testing, said in order to field systems that meet the needs of troops on the ground, DOD needs to change the way it tests in two key ways — by providing more opportunities for small tech companies to wring out their systems, and staging those tests in the field with military operators.

“If we want to succeed, we have to embed engineers with warfighters, and we have to be out in the field testing,” he said. “We have to do it all the time.”

Commercial access

Helping DOD get to that “all-the-time” testing cadence is a rising priority for DIU.

In June, it announced a prize challenge called Project G.I., which calls for “ready-now” uncrewed systems that can help increase the effectiveness of small military cells operating in low-bandwidth environments with disrupted communications. Companies selected will participate in a live demonstration with military operators and a subset of those will advance for a chance to either receive funding to mature their systems or contracts to deliver capabilities to military units for further testing or prototyping.

A second effort, DIU’s new Range Strike Group, was launched earlier this summer to take a wholistic look at the testing challenge. Will Ryan, autonomy program manager at DIU and one of the leaders of the task force, said the group is still in the early phases of defining the problem and formulating ideas for how to address it. From there, it will craft recommendations and identify offices within DOD that are best positioned to move them forward.

Ryan told Defense News that improving test access for a wider swath of companies benefits not only the firms themselves but the Defense Department — especially as it looks to field technology that both works and can be delivered on faster timelines.

“Providing an opportunity for these companies to assess their products in a contested environment against a notional threat is really valuable, one, for the DOD to assess their product in that way,” he said. “But it’s also important for the companies to see where they’re succeeding or where they’re falling short so they can make tweaks and have a better product.”

One of the group’s early tasks is to identify the policy hurdles that programs have to clear in order organize an EW test event. DOD has its own policies around spectrum management as do the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission, which require programs to go through an approval process to perform any testing that interferes with GPS or communications signals.

Programs that are testing outside of a military installation also need waivers from the FAA to fly aircraft at distances that extend further than what an operator can see, or beyond the visual line of sight. Some requirements are eased for testing on DOD bases because the airspace around the installations is restricted.

Another challenge: Many military ranges aren’t equipped with the infrastructure to support EW testing — and if they are, program managers looking to schedule a test have to navigate a slew of policy and safety restrictions to minimize the impact of GPS disruption on nearby cities or towns as well as commercial aircraft.

DOD’s most advanced ranges, like White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, are in high demand by some of the military’s most complex systems, making it hard for smaller programs and companies to access them.

John Sawyer, a UAS analyst in the Pentagon’s acquisition and sustainment office who helped coordinate the Alaska testing, said all of these challenges add up for programs who don’t have access to significant resources and are running tight schedules.

“If you’re looking to do it on the cheap with a very minimal budget and you’re looking to do it on an accelerated timeline, it’s tough,” he told Defense News.

Ryan said the Range Strike Group may be able to help find new testing locations and explore ways to either streamline them or ease them under certain conditions to ease the burden on test organizers.

“It’s not throwing them away or ignoring them — it’s how can we streamline them or assume the right amount or risk whatever set of environmental conditions exist. Like here,” he said, referring to the remote Alaska test site, “Do those policies apply as much as they do somewhere that’s closer to New York City?”

Location, location

Knowing it would take time to find the right location for DIU’s recent EW tests, Emeneker started scouting locations for the electronic warfare last summer. He cast a wide net, putting Ukraine at the top of the list.

“There’s no better place in the world to test,” he said.

Drones have been a major feature of the war and Ukraine’s battle-tested approach to bottom-up development and rapid fielding and iteration is one the U.S. military and its allies want to replicate — or at least draw lessons from.

Since the early days of the war, well-connected and funded U.S. companies have traveled to the front lines to test their systems against live EW threats and get a better understanding of what capabilities Ukrainian drone operators most needed.

Chris Bonzagni is a former DIU program manager who now runs a defense consulting firm that helps U.S. drone firms test in Ukraine. Since leaving DIU in 2022, he’s traveled to the country many times and seen firsthand how the urgency of war has driven innovation and experience for the military and for the commercial firms that support it.

“In Ukraine, these guys are not afraid to fail and they’re doing it because they have to do it and there’s necessity there,” said Bonzagni, who was on the ground in Alaska supporting EW testing. “The difference between those guys and here is they have access to ranges and they just do reps and reps and reps and reps. Here, you see how much we have to do to get all the resources.”

However, without support, it’s not feasible for most small firms to navigate the process for in-country testing, Bonzagni told Defense News.

“The logistics are hard to get in,” he said. “The well-capitalized startups that can invest that time and invest that equipment are able to do so and the smaller startups are definitely prohibited.”

Bonzagni said this is an area where the Defense Department could help create a process to send firms to Ukraine, but the U.S. military has long been wary of formal involvement. Following President Donald Trump’s election to his second term last November, the growing political strain between the incoming administration and the Ukrainian government has made it harder.

For DIU, that meant the odds of getting the approvals to stage DOD-sponsored testing in Ukraine grew slimmer and ultimately wasn’t feasible, Emeneker said.

His team explored other international locations, but the flight and spectrum restrictions there are similar to those in the U.S.

So, DIU opted for Alaska, which Emeneker said is one of the few suitable domestic options for EW testing. It’s remote, which means there are fewer concerns about signal disruption impacting nearby cities. And its long summer days, bringing nearly 21 hours of daylight in late June, make room for early morning testing that can extend well into the evening testing.

DIU and other Pentagon offices coordinated with the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, who supported the testing and provided the EW effects, for help scheduling the tests and getting the appropriate waivers.

Equipment shortfalls

During the first day of testing, as companies conducted baseline flights and the 11th ABN’s EW operators tested their equipment, it became clear that the effectors the unit was equipped with weren’t having the impact DIU had hoped for.

Much of the kit was more than 20 years old, designed to counter threats in Iraq and Afghanistan, not the more high-tech, software-defined systems that modern militaries use today that can shift frequencies and evade detection.

A lack of suitable test EW equipment is a known issue in DOD. A 2021 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine highlighted these concerns.

“Most tests are run against old threat systems, and they do not have the software-defined agile threat systems that would allow testing against more representative threats,” the report found.

Because of limited testing resources, units do their best with the older systems and adapt their tactics to try to make the most of them. That was the case for the 11th ABN, according to Sgt. Peter Spurgeon, an EW operator in the division.

“We’re trying to take a two-decade-old piece of equipment and tool it to a modern day [threat],” he said.

By the end of day two, the division showed some improvement, partly because the testing shifted focus from command-and-control effects — which its equipment wasn’t suited for — to Global Navigation Satellite System, or GNSS jamming.

Lt. Col. Scott Smith, the division’s director for non-lethal effects, said he saw the operators get better at figuring out which equipment worked best in different scenarios and finding new ways to disrupt frequencies.

Smith said testing like this is crucial for operators to practice troubleshooting and learn new techniques against a live system. From an advocacy perspective, it also helps raise awareness of the significant equipment gaps and will hopefully create momentum around getting more testing resources to the unit.

Zooming in on failure to push for more funding can be a difficult line to walk, Smith noted, but he pointed to efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative — which aims to restructure and upgrade the service’s processes and systems — as a sign that there’s an appetite for improvement.

“The Army Transformation Initiative that was recently pushed out, it’s like ‘Hey, we’ve got to get more agile and more flexible,’” he said. “We think this fits right in with that.”

The software-driven signal jammer, Pulsar-L, comes in two configurations — airborne and expeditionary. The company unveiled its first three Pulsar variants last year: Pulsar-V, which is a vehicle version; Pulsar Alpha, which is airborne; and a fixed-site configuration.

The primary differentiator between those variants and Pulsar-L is size, weight and power, Anduril’s Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer Chris Brose told reporters Monday. The smaller system is about the size of a shoebox and weighs less than 25 pounds.

“Think of Pulsar-L as a smaller form factor that’s going to extend that capability even farther out to the tactical edge onboard platforms and weapon systems,” Brose said.

Pulsar-L is already being used in operations and was first fielded last year. Brose declined to tell reporters where it’s stationed, but noted the system is “participating in real-world operations in the most stressing EW environments.”

Brose touted the speed at which the Anduril developed Pulsar-L, saying it took just eight months to move from the concept phase to fielding, largely because of the company’s common hardware and software platforms.

Pulsar-L can operate independently or with Anduril’s Lattice software, is user-friendly and can be set up in a matter of minutes, officials said. The company is pitching the system as an alternative to clunkier EW capabilities that it described in a press release as “rigid, manual, cumbersome and threat-specific.”

The system’s usability is closely tied to its autonomous technology, according to Sam El-Akkad, general manager of radio frequency and EW systems.

“All the operator needs to do, they can put it in an autonomous mode where it ingests the spectrum, figures out what’s out there, decides what’s a threat and what’s not and then engages those things,” he said in the briefing with Brose. “It all happens magically under the hood.”

With the first units fielded, Anduril is focused on ramping up production. El-Akkad said the firm plans to produce more than 100 low-rate initial production units by the end of this year, with a goal of scaling to thousands of Pulsar-L jammers annually in the next few years.

Brose declined to name Anduril’s early Pulsar-L buyers, but the company has been awarded several contracts in recent years for similar technologies.

Last October, an undisclosed Defense Department bought an unspecified number of Pulsar jammers as part of a $250 million counter-drone package that included 500 all-up rounds of Anduril’s Roadrunner interceptor.

The firm is also on a 10-year, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $1 billion with U.S. Special Operations Command to supply counter-drone hardware and software, including Pulsar, Lattice, Sentry Tower and its Anvil interceptor.

The long-range Atlantique 2 aircraft on a new mission for NATO then shifted its high-tech gaze onto another target, and another after that until, after more than five hours on patrol, the plane’s array of sensors had scoped out the bulk of the Baltic — from Germany in the west to Estonia in the northeast, bordering Russia.

The flight’s mere presence in the skies above the strategic sea last week, combined with military ships patrolling on the waters, also sent an unmistakable message: The NATO alliance is ratcheting up its guard against suspected attempts to sabotage underwater energy and data cables and pipelines that crisscross the Baltic, prompted by a growing catalogue of incidents that have damaged them.

“We will do everything in our power to make sure that we fight back, that we are able to see what is happening and then take the next steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. And our adversaries should know this,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said this month in announcing a new alliance mission, dubbed “Baltic Sentry,” to protect the underwater infrastructure vital to the economic well-being of Baltic-region nations.

What’s under the Baltic?

Power and communications cables and gas pipelines stitch together the nine countries with shores on the Baltic, a relatively shallow and nearly landlocked sea. A few examples are the 94-mile Balticconnector pipeline that carries gas between Finland and Estonia, the high-voltage Baltic Cable connecting the power grids of Sweden and Germany, and the 729-mile C-Lion1 telecommunications cable between Finland and Germany.

Why are cables important?

Undersea pipes and cables help power economies, keep houses warm and connect billions of people. More than 807,800 miles of fiber optic cables — more than enough to stretch to the moon and back — span the world’s oceans and seas, according to TeleGeography, which tracks and maps the vital communication networks. The cables are typically the width of a garden hose. But 97% of the world’s communications, including trillions of dollars of financial transactions, pass through them each day.

“In the last two months alone, we have seen damage to a cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden, another connecting Germany and Finland, and most recently, a number of cables linking Estonia and Finland. Investigations of all of these cases are still ongoing. But there is reason for grave concern,” Rutte said on Jan. 14.

What’s causing alarm?

At least 11 Baltic cables have been damaged since October 2023 — the most recent being a fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland, reported to have ruptured on Sunday. Although cable operators note that subsea cable damage is commonplace, the frequency and concentration of incidents in the Baltic heightened suspicions that damage might have been deliberate.

There also are fears that Russia could target cables as part of a wider campaign of so-called “hybrid warfare” to destabilize European nations helping Ukraine defend itself against the full-scale invasion that Moscow has been pursuing since 2022.

Without specifically blaming Russia, Rutte said: “Hybrid means sabotage. Hybrid means cyber-attacks. Hybrid means sometimes even assassination attacks, attempts, and in this case, it means hitting on our critical undersea infrastructure.”

Finnish police suspect that the Eagle S, an oil tanker that damaged the Estlink 2 power cable and two other communications cables linking Finland and Estonia on Dec. 25th, is part of Moscow’s “shadow fleet” used to avoid war-related sanctions on Russian oil exports.

Finnish authorities seized the tanker shortly after it left a Russian port and apparently cut the cables by dragging its anchor. Finnish investigators allege the ship left an almost 62-mile-long anchor trail on the seabed.

Intelligence agencies’ doubts

Several Western intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of their work, told The Associated Press that recent damage was most likely accidental, seemingly caused by anchors being dragged by ships that were poorly maintained and poorly crewed.

One senior intelligence official told AP that ships’ logs and mechanical failures with ships’ anchors were among “multiple indications” pointing away from Russian sabotage. The official said Russian cables were also severed. Another Western official, also speaking anonymously to discuss intelligence matters, said Russia sent an intelligence-gathering vessel to the site of one cable rupture to investigate the damage.

The Washington Post first reported on the emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services that maritime accidents likely caused recent damage.

Cable operators advise caution

The European Subsea Cables Association, representing cable owners and operators, noted in November after faults were reported on two Baltic links that, on average, a subsea cable is damaged somewhere in the world every three days. In northern European waters, the main causes of damage are commercial fishing or ship anchors, it said.

In the fiber-optic cable rupture on Sunday connecting Latvia and Sweden, Swedish authorities detained a Maltese-flagged ship bound for South America with a cargo of fertilizer.

Navibulgar, a Bulgarian company that owns the Vezhen, said any damage was unintentional and that the ship’s crew discovered while navigating in extremely bad weather that its left anchor appeared to have dragged on the seabed.

NATO’s ‘Baltic Sentry’ mission

The alliance is deploying warships, maritime patrol aircraft and naval drones for the mission to provide “enhanced surveillance and deterrence.”

Aboard the French Navy surveillance flight, the 14-member crew cross-checked ships they spotted from the air against lists of vessels they had been ordered to watch for.

“If we witness some suspicious activities from ships as sea — for example, ships at very low speed or at anchorage in a position that they shouldn’t be at this time — so this is something we can see,” said the flight commander, Lt. Alban, whose surname was withheld by the French military for security reasons.

“We can have a very close look with our sensors to see what is happening.”

Burrows reported from London. AP journalists Jill Lawless in London, David Klepper in Washington and Veselin Toshkov in Sofia, Bulgaria, contributed to this report.

The Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team Manpack, or TLS BCT, is being fielded to the service’s three “Transformation in Contact” brigades. The Army selected the brigades to receive new commercial equipment, expert training and a series of experiments while preparing for operational deployments.

But soldiers shouldn’t worry — every brigade will receive the TLS BCT.

“The system is going to be deployed to every brigade combat unit in the Army,” said Ken Strayer, program manager for Electronic Warfare and Cyber in an Army release.

Officials intend to field the TLS BCT Manpack to up to two brigade combat teams a month over the next three years, according to the release.

TLS BCT is a configurable radio system that can survey radio frequencies, collect signals, perform direction-finding operations, detect electromagnetic attacks and visualize electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) data.

The Army awarded a nearly $100 million contract to Mastodon Design, a CACI subsidiary, to build, field and train soldiers on the system in July, according to an Army release.

Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, head of Program Executive Office-Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, laid out some ways in which commanders might use electronic warfare equipment on a panel at the annual Association of Old Crows Annual Symposium in National Harbor, Maryland, on Thursday.

“To help that commander see what they look like within the [electromagnetic spectrum],” Barker said. “What do they need to control?”

Barker also discussed the suite of electronic warfare capabilities in his PEO portfolio, including the recently fielded TLS BCT and the future TLS Echelons Above Brigade, or TLS EAB, under development.

The systems will allow soldiers to conduct both signals intelligence and electronic detection and attack in one package.

“It’s providing them the ability to understand and affect in the [electromagnetic spectrum] environment,” Barker said.

In an Army release, Col. Leslie Gorman, Army Capability Manager — Electronic Warfare director, described the TLS BCT as a smaller and lighter version of a similar device first used by Army special operations forces.

The three “Transformation in Contact” brigades now putting TLS BCT through its paces are the 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii; the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York; and the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Traditionally, the military often withdraws units from operations to field, test and implement new equipment and tactics. The “Transformation in Contact” approach seeks to continuously improve equipment fielding and adoption as the modern battlefield rapidly transforms.

The 101st Brigade conducted their rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Johnson, in late August. In October, the Hawaii brigade did its Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center at home.

The 10th Mountain brigade is slated for an overseas rotation next year in which its members will use the TLS BCT.

Two of the brigades already have the gear, according to the release, with the third to receive it soon. Officials did not specify which brigades had the equipment.

All three will provide feedback from experiences “in the box” at the combat training center rotations and on real-world deployments back to the developers. That feedback is expected to help improve the equipment as the service upgrades it and fields new versions continually across the Army.

Developed by Eprius, the long-pulse, high-power microwave technology known as Leonidas Expeditionary can drop swarms of drones with massive and pointed walls of electromagnetic energy.

Epirus has already delivered high-powered microwave systems to the Army as part of a $66 million contract last year.

It developed its latest Leonidas capability in partnership with the Office of Naval Research, Joint Counter-Small UAS Office, the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO).

The company unveiled the system on Sept. 23 and is expected to deliver the completed system to the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab by the end of this year.

So far there are four iterations of the Leonidas system including the newest, which is formally known as the Expeditionary Directed Energy Counter-Swarm, or ExDECS.

Earlier Leonidas offerings have included systems that can be attached to vehicles or air drones.

Leonidas ExDECS is another systems entry on the smaller side, capable of “swarm defeat,” with a transportable profile that’s highly mobile and provides a low physical signature, according to Andrew Wargofchik, a spokesperson for Epirus.

The crown jewel of the Epirus system, aside from its microwave system, is a technology called Line Replaceable Amplifier Module, or LRAM. It’s an architecture that allows the company to scale systems up or down.

“We like to think of them as sort of very scalable Lego blocks,” Wargofchik said.

The announcement of the Leonidas Expeditionary comes on the heels of the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference, where AI’s role in the defense industry was the talk of the town.

But as the future of warfare arrives, Wargofchik said Epirus doesn’t buy into the concept that killer robots are on the horizon.

He noted projects like the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or unmanned fighter jets, as a better embodiment of what lies ahead.

Half-man, half-AI is the defense landscape the company envisioned – manned systems existing harmoniously alongside unmanned ones.

“Our CEO, Andy Lowery, likes to call it centaur warfare,” Wargofchik said.

While some in the industry criticize the Defense Department for not adopting existing and emerging AI and machine learning technologies quickly enough, Epirus is more optimistic.

One of the main challenges involves bridging the gap between research and development to mass production, Wargofchik said.

Though the company began with the explicit goal of providing high-powered microwave systems for counter-drone missions, it’s expanding the development of the same systems as a counter for any-and-all electronics.

In April, Epirus demonstrated its capability to effectively take out certain vessel motors at sea during a Navy event.

“We’re kind of arriving at the shores of a whole new beach of maritime applications,” Wargofchik said.

While many aspects of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resemble World War I — trenches, barbed wires, heavy exchanges of artillery — the innovative use of drones has been game-changing. Unmanned systems are altering the character of warfare, and the ongoing integration of AI and robotics will further accelerate this dramatic shift. It is why these were my top modernization objectives during my tenure as Army secretary and secretary of defense.

The potency of unmanned systems is most pronounced when it comes to small aerial drones — essentially robots — that are used today to conduct the same tasks that soldiers performed in the past: reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting and direct attack. But they do it far more efficiently and accurately. For instance, when I was a platoon leader decades ago, it typically took a couple infantrymen to destroy a tank at a max range of 3,750 meters. Today, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can do the same at far greater distances, with better success, and at much less cost.

To date, Ukraine has destroyed over 10,000 Russian vehicles, nearly one-third of which are tanks. Many of these were killed by UAVs. Ukraine has also had great success using unmanned surface vehicles to sink or damage a number of Russian ships in the Black Sea.

The introduction of drone swarms — think of dozens or hundreds of UAVs being employed simultaneously — will make the battlefield more lethal than ever before. From a production perspective, generating such a number is not an arduous task. At a gathering this summer of the Aspen Strategy Group that focused on AI, I co-led a panel discussion where one former U.S. official reported that Kyiv is acquiring well over 50,000 drones a month. The speed and cost at which the Ukrainians can do this compared to the United States is shocking.

As important, because the software on these drones is easily modified, Ukraine’s military can keep up with the changing threats and tactics of the modern battlefield. This is something many of our existing platforms, which are defined — and usually trapped in time — by their hardware, often cannot do. The good news is that this can be remedied with more investment in American innovation and process changes.

AI is also revolutionizing a wide range of administrative and logistical functions far removed from the front lines. It will do what AI does best: improve the speed, accuracy, cost and quality of decision-making. Artificial Intelligence can be used for preventive maintenance to reduce the likelihood of equipment breaking down during the fight; it can ensure the right supplies get to the right place at the right time; it can improve talent management in the force; transform supply chain risk management in the defense industrial base; and the use of large language models can hyperpower military staffs. This is the future for a broad range of ordinary military tasks, in addition to enhancing our warfighters’ effectiveness and survivability on the battlefield.

All this demands that DOD accelerate its across-the-board adoption of AI and advancement of robotics and autonomy. It is an asymmetric advantage the U.S. must master first and retain preeminence over. This means investing far more in these technologies, adopting commercial standards and processes as much as possible, capturing all the department’s data in a central repository, prototyping and testing far more aggressively and showing a willingness to deploy needed systems even when one’s confidence level is less than 100%. At the same time, the Pentagon must continue to do these things responsibly, beginning with the ethical principles for AI that I established in February 2020.

As the war in Ukraine rages on, we must heed the lessons from it and do everything in our power to ensure our military has the advanced AI, robotics and autonomy tools it needs to fight — and win — the battles of tomorrow. Doing so, and with a far greater sense of urgency, will serve us incredibly well in any future conflict; especially if we must face off against our greatest strategic threat today — a People’s Republic of China — with the world’s largest and most concentrated armed forces.

Dr. Mark T. Esper was the 27th secretary of defense and author of the New York Times bestseller, “A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times.” He is also a partner and board member in the AI venture firm Red Cell Partners.

This brave new world in Army electronic warfare was on display recently during the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division’s rotation this month at the Joint Readiness Training Center.

The U.S. military in general, from the Pentagon to each service branch, is prioritizing such capabilities, both how to use artificial intelligence and drones and how to defend against an enemy using the same technology.

During the 101′s recent rotation, soldiers used a new app called “Shrike,” which identifies targets with minimal information and spits out a ready-to-go, call-for-fire mission.

The app is the brainchild of Army Futures Command, featuring software that uses an artificial intelligence capability mounted on any fielded drone. Each drone’s small circuit board draws on a large-language model backbone.

Soldiers flew the drone with the attached device and software over their enemy’s motor pool to scan their adversary’s vehicles.

Once data has been processed, a subsequent flight can identify a netted and camouflaged vehicle from an exposed wheel, bumper or part of a windshield and recognize what kind of vehicle it is, said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, 101st Airborne Division commander.

The program then generates a call-for-fire mission automatically for the human user to approve or disapprove.

But the application has another layer.

Once the fire mission is complete, the drone can scan the area immediately, conduct a battle damage assessment and generate another fire mission to destroy the target, Sylvia said.

The Army standard is five to eight minutes to identify and get rounds on target in a traditional fire mission, though some take as long as 15 minutes, the two-star said, but 101st soldiers using this software have done so in less than a minute.

More tech tricks are in the toolkit of soldiers headed to training and deployment as part of the Army’s Transformation in Contact, an effort focused on injecting five years’ worth of modernization into three separate brigade combat teams, including brigades from the 101st, the 25th Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division.

The Army’s professional opposition force, or “enemy” troops, in combat training center rotations such as the one here use homemade sensors to detect an electromagnetic “reading” or “snapshot” of the Army units they fight.

During this August rotation, the 101st took some notes and brought their own sensors, drones and even homemade decoys. Soldiers took $30 circuit boards and used them as decoys to mimic electronic signatures with fake names such as “command post laptop” or “Garmin smartwatch,” tricking the adversary into thinking that what they’re scanning is an actual headquarters.

In one of the first fights, soldiers mimicked the electronic signature of their own command post using these decoys and placed the decoys in the opposite direction of their actual command post.

The trick worked.

“The enemy spent 50% of their artillery against the dirt, where we had those decoys,” 2nd Brigade commander Col. James Stultz told reporters here.

The brigade brought 250 such decoys with it on its 500-mile air assault from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, down to Louisiana for the training, he said.

And even in new-era training, the enemy learns too, pushing the soldiers to play a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the enemy’s reconnaissance drones.

During the first week of the exercise, an enemy drone locked onto the brigade’s mobile, Humvee-based command post.

Soldiers with the brigade set up a kind of invisible “net” of counter-drone defense gear and tried to lure the enemy drone into the “net” using their command post as bait.

The colonel said they didn’t trap the drone, but the soldiers did manage to shake the drone off the Humvee’s tail and avoid a strike that would have taken out the headquarters.

In early August, the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, conducted a 500-mile air assault from their home station to the Joint Readiness Training Center. On Aug. 22, the brigade launched a large-scale combat maneuver using novel approaches, homegrown technology and smaller headquarters.

The brigade is one of three currently experimenting with various tech, from electromagnetic spectrum tools and hide, decoy or detect signatures to counter-drone capabilities and nimble, small-footprint command posts running operations — which once took 60 troops — with only eight soldiers.

The two additional brigades, the Hawaii-stationed 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division and the Fort Drum, New York-based 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division are in earlier stages of developing such tech, with combat training center rotations planned for later this year and early 2025.

By this time next year, other brigades within these brigades’ divisions could see formations transform, with new tech at their fingertips for a “fight tonight” scenario, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said.

The Army’s efforts to transform the entire combat force over the next five years are expected to yield tangible results in the next year among those three brigades, added Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

It’s all part of a larger initiative, announced in 2023, called “Transformation in Contact.” The effort puts soldiers at the center of solving tactical problems at the brigade level and below.

Many assets formerly part of the brigade-centric fight are now going to be the division level, which Army leaders say will lighten the operational burden on brigades, freeing them to do what brigades are supposed to do: destroy things.

The 101st is working with the Mobile Brigade Combat Team concept, which centers mobility around the infantry squad vehicle, said Capt. Charles O’Hagan, company commander for the brigades recon company.

That simple adjustment allowed a newly formed brigade reconnaissance company to go into the wood line Aug. 14 and work through Aug. 23 without the need for resupply, O’Hagan said. A dismounted company would require resupply in half that time.

In recent years, the Army has sought to shrink command posts for brigades and divisions, getting away from bulky, multivehicle convoys with massive radar dishes, antenna farms and tents that took hours to set up.

Army leaders point to Ukraine as a real-world example. Russian forces got bogged down early in the war and saw hundreds of operational commanders killed as Ukrainian troops employed simple signals intelligence detection and strike methods with drones and other cheap devices.

But even getting to the fight requires reconfiguring the way brigades have approached maneuver for more than 20 years.

A Global War on Terror-era brigade would hold about 4,300 soldiers. That number now sits at 3,000.

Sylvia said the division command elements of the Fort Campbell brigade performed mobile strike missions requiring 76 aircraft to haul more than 2,000 soldiers and 252 pieces of equipment across more than 500 miles on two avenues of approach. That maneuver necessitated at least two refueling points before troops hit the ground at 14 different landing zones.

Another 700 soldiers were needed to manage the forward area refueling points along the route from Fort Campbell to Fort Johnson, he said.

The 500-mile mark is key, Sylvia added. If the Army can strike from that distance, they can strike nearly any important feature of Russia, China, Iran or North Korea from regional installations.

The division practiced this sort of long-range assault in January using legacy gear and approaches, the two-star said.

“What we found was a huge disconnect between the brigade and its ability to communicate, and between the division and the brigades to be able to control those formations,” Sylvia said.

In their follow-up exercise, the brigade was able to use commercial tech, two avenues of approach and refueling points to better manage movement, Sylvia said.

“Our forward area refueling points are the lifeblood of this division,” Sylvia said.

Combat aviation brigade must be available to each brigade commander but coordinated by the division to be effective in moving all elements.

Moving assets to the division has streamlined the brigade, reducing time for many functions and allowing more creative tactics in combat training.

Soldiers now operate from four Humvees, one infantry squad vehicle and a 200-square-foot command post with smaller, distant antenna cluster. This replaces the previous 600-square-foot command post with an antenna farm and eight-plus vehicles and trailers.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vidal Perez, who works communication for 2nd Brigade’s command post, said setup and teardown used to take 30 to 45 minutes, which often meant colocating antennas with the command post — a setup that emitted a large signal for anyone looking to strike the brigade’s headquarters.

Now, with everything running on a cloud network and using commercial satellite technology, setup and teardown take just 10 to 20 minutes, Perez said.

Perez’s team have even set up “decoy” command posts by using commercially purchased circuit cards and power supplies, labeling them as 2nd Brigade Command Post and other names and dumping them in clusters in the woods for the opposition to detect and strike.

And when they strike, they reveal their positions for a counterattack.

In October, the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division is slated for its own test with a rotation through the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii.

That validation event will provide lessons for the future brigades. The 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division is set for a combat training center rotation in 2025.

As the three brigades share lessons from their experiments, Army senior leaders will evaluate their adjustments over the coming year. Successful outcomes are expected to spread across other brigades within their respective divisions, George said.

How Army unit composition has evolved

Looking at the differences between the Army’s pre-2004 division-centric setup, its post-GWOT brigade-centric construction and its 2030 construct, unit composition looks like the following:

Pre-2004 division-centric

• Three infantry brigades
• Two combat aviation brigades
• Sustainment brigade
• Artillery brigade
• Support command
• Signal battalion
• Air defense artillery battalion
• Military intelligence battalion
• Engineer battalion

GWOT brigade-centric

• Four infantry brigades
• Two combat aviation brigades
• Division sustainment brigade
• Division artillery brigade
• Special troops battalion

New division 2030 working construct

• Three mobile brigade combat teams
• One combat aviation brigade
• Division sustainment brigade
• Division artillery brigade
• Signal battalion
• Military intelligence battalion
• Engineer battalion
• Mobile protected firepower battalion
• Counter drone battery

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly identify the brigade from 10th Mountain Division that is participating in the Army’s Transforming in Contact experiments.

“Of all the imperatives, this is perhaps the broadest and the one with the most potential impact,” he said in the March 2022 speech. “Our terrestrial forces, joint and combined, cannot survive and perform their missions if our adversary’s space-based operational support systems, especially targeting systems, are allowed to operate with impunity.”

Kendall’s emphasis on resilience in space is underpinned by two ideas that have picked up traction across the Defense Department in recent years. First, capabilities like GPS, satellite communications and space-based intelligence collection play an essential, enabling role in most U.S. military operations. And second, threats from adversaries like China and Russia have put those capabilities at risk.

The creation of the Space Force in 2019 was a step toward strengthening the resourcing and organizational heft of the military space enterprise. In making space resilience central to the secretary’s operational imperatives, the push is expected to get top billing when it comes to divvying up scarce Air Force and Space Force budget dollars.

“We’ve only begun to define, and have not yet fully resourced, the space systems we will need to secure the nation,” he said at the time.

The service has made some progress over the last few years defining a more resilient space architecture, Kendall told Defense News in a recent interview. He said he’s happy with the Space Force’s plan to achieve resiliency through fielding smaller satellites in a more diverse range of orbits.

However, to field those satellites and ground systems, he said, the Space Force’s $30 billion budget needs to grow — whether that’s through internal Defense Department trades or an increase from Congress.

“That budget is going to need to double or triple over time to be able to fund the things we’re actually going to need to have,” he said. “Somebody’s going to have to make some decisions about whether to give us a bigger budget overall for this or do some internal trades.”

A growing budget appetite

Kendall’s call for a larger space budget follows several years of steady funding growth for the Space Force.

The service’s budget has nearly doubled in the five years since it was established, but that increase reflects mission consolidation more than it does new investment, as many space-focused personnel and programs from the Army and Navy as well as the Space Development Agency moved under the purview of the new service.

In fiscal 2025, the Space Force’s requested budget is slated to drop slightly to around $30 billion, due largely to constraints imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which puts a cap on defense spending.

Budget documents show that the service expects its funding to remain relatively flat over the next five years.

Gen. Michael Guetlein, the service’s vice chief of space operations, told Defense News that the Pentagon’s funding outlook doesn’t match the demand the Space Force is seeing from users in the field. Soon, he said, the service’s ability to respond to combatant command requirements in a crisis could be limited.

“We are maxing out our budget today and seeing a flat-line budget in the DOD. It’s got to change,” he said. “We are seeing a threat that is absolutely intent on narrowing the capability gap between us and them. Today, we have margin in that capability gap. . . . If we don’t start increasing our investment in space, we’re going to see that capability gap reverse.”

Defense budget expert Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, echoed Guetlein’s concern that without a boost in funding, the Space Force won’t be able to take on new missions, let alone respond to current demands. That includes the Space Development Agency’s plan to buy hundreds of satellites to track advanced missile threats and form a data transport layer in space.

“The Space Force is trying to get into new mission areas,” he said in a May webinar hosted by the National Security Space Association. “It’s going to cost more.”

In the near-term, more funding for the Space Force could come through a congressional budget increase, though based on the FY25 funding levels proposed by appropriators in both chambers, a move in the opposite direction appears more likely. The House Appropriations Committee’s policy bill would, if passed, cut about $900 million from the Space Force’s request. Meanwhile, Senate funding legislation would slash around $1 billion.

Funding could also come from other parts of the Air Force or DOD budget, requiring the department to make trade-offs in its FY26 request in order to fund key space missions like missile warning, space domain awareness and counterspace capabilities, which include the offensive and defensive space protection measures.

An enduring process

As the Space Force advocates for more funding, leaders have been working in the background to determine the right mix of satellites and other capabilities needed for adapting to new threats in orbit.

That process, which started in 2021, is led largely by the Space Warfighting Analysis Center, which has been conducting mission-by-mission studies aimed at crafting the Space Force’s ideal, or objective, force structure for the next 10 to 15 years.

Guetlein said the work being conducted by the SWAC is akin to creating puzzle pieces — and after more than three years, the service has most of those pieces in hand.

That includes a plan for fielding offensive and defensive systems, known as counterspace weapons. Most of these capabilities are classified, but options range from cyber or electronic warfare systems to kinetic weapons.

Both Kendall and Guetlein declined to offer details on the Space Force’s counterspace architecture. Guetlein noted that the service’s plan includes not only systems and technology, but also a strategy for running exercises ensure it’s using these capabilities responsibly.

“We are actually trying to [establish] norms of behavior to ensure that what we’re doing is safe and responsible but at the same time understanding we also have to be effective, which means I need to field credible capabilities to be able to counter the threat,” he said.

The next step is to put the puzzle together. The service announced in March that a new organization, Space Futures Command, would be responsible for that work. Once force design is complete, it will then get passed to the requirements community to identify near and longer term funding needs.

The Space Force plans to submit the first of those objective force designs in the fall of 2025 and will update that work every five years to incorporate any changes to the threat environment or other factors.

Guetlein said the process the Space Force has articulated and the creation of Space Futures Command are a direct response to the operational imperatives Kendall laid out early in his tenure. He expects they’ll continue to drive strategy and decision-making for years go come.

“It’s the foundation of everything that we’re going to do,” he said.