Robots and machines are reshaping the modern battlefield, and the Army is working hard to adapt the way it fights—one soldier and one unit at a time.

“As a human, we all have to adapt because the world is changing,” said Pfc. Jessica Sesay, who graduated from Infantry One-Station Unit Training at Fort Moore, Georgia, in late 2022 and is now a member of an experimentation force known as the EXFOR that’s focused on robotics and small-unit modernization.

The 23-year-old Sesay hasn’t seen much of the U.S. Army, but she is confident that troops and robots will work well together. “In basic training, they always say to trust your equipment,” Sesay said. “I’m a new private. I just come in and everything’s going to be new to me, but the more I have experience on it, the more I get to do it, it becomes more and more normal.”

Threats All Around

Soldiers’ adaptability and ingenuity are what Army leaders are counting on as they prepare and train the force for a rapidly changing world. Machines already have altered the way wars are fought, which is evident in places such as Ukraine and the Middle East, where soldiers must hide from drones and evade the munitions that drones deploy.

On the ground, threats arrive on autonomous vehicles, and robots enter buildings ahead of soldiers to provide reconnaissance around corners, up stairways and down corridors.

Autonomous technology is being used by and against fighting forces to kill humans, tanks and aircraft. This is why the Army is leveraging all the technology it can to give soldiers like Sesay and her cohort the best future battlefield advantage possible.

“I think what we’re witnessing is the very leading edge of the major disruption of the land domain that’s going to be caused by machines,” Gen. James Rainey, commander of U.S. Army Futures Command, said during remarks at a Strategic Landpower Dialogue event co-hosted in early June by the Association of the U.S. Army and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Technology is now getting to the point where it can actually have meaningful, significant disruption in the land domain, and we’d better be ahead of that,” Rainey said. “Five years from now, people are going to look back and say, ‘Yeah, that [unmanned aircraft system] thing in Ukraine, that was the leading edge of what is a monstrous disruption that’s coming.’ ”

Rainey, who asserts that land will always be decisive in war, also has noted that war will “always be a human endeavor.”

At the start of the Army’s discussion about how robots could be used in combat, “we were kind of going down a machines-replace-humans” idea, he said. The concept raised troubling concerns, including the potential for a breach of the Army’s code of ethics by machines acting on their own, he said.

Now, Rainey said, having seen what is possible through the refinement of robotics and the ingenuity of soldiers, “I’m a strong believer in that it’s not about humans replacing machines, it’s how do you optimize the two so you get a better capability.”

As robotic equipment advances and reveals its multiple uses, human-machine integration is a high priority in the Army’s transformation strategy.

Robotics experiments take place with select units across the Army, informed by testing at Fort Moore’s Maneuver Battle Lab by the EXFOR, an experimentation force established 20 years ago to focus on small-unit modernization.

Unit in Demand

The unit, which is in high demand, now focuses solely on robotics and how they will fit into modern units. Today, beyond testing individual pieces of equipment, the EXFOR is developing blueprints for a new kind of platoon that will specialize in robotic systems for heavy and light formations.

“This whole [human-machine integration] thing has just exploded,” said Capt. Tim Young, the unit’s commander. The EXFOR is the only experimental unit of its kind at Fort Moore’s U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence, which is the proponent for infantry, armor and now, robotics.

Rainey and other Army senior leaders are interested “not only in the equipment, but the formation as a whole and the human-machine integration effort,” Young said.

The integration of robots Rainey wants to see “is not just, ‘I’m going to give a robot to a unit.’ It’s ‘I’m going to give a platoon to a battalion,’ and then that platoon can focus on tactics, techniques and procedures,” said retired Col. Christopher Willis, director of the Maneuver Battle Lab. “In the future, at some point, the Army will then start creating these platoons out in the force.”

Such platoons are envisioned at the battalion level, where their expertise, much as a medical or mortar platoon, could be pushed down to companies. Rainey has said two prototype platoons could be fielded to the operational force for experimentation early next year.

Experiments with operational units have shown that soldiers can adapt. But some learning curves have emerged that have to do with getting used to the concept of sacrificing a machine instead of a human, Young said.

In experiments with units in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 1st Armored Division, soldiers would “try to put their forces out and then try to preserve the robots, but that’s not the intent of the robots,” Young said. “You have to shift your mindset, push the robots out, because there’s no reason we should shed human blood on first contact.”

On an exercise in the Philippines during a six-month rotation earlier this year, soldiers with the 25th Infantry Division quickly adapted to new technology, including a manually guided cart that can transport a multitude of items, including humans. The soldiers used the cart to transport heavy ammunition and water. They also learned that the ground they patrolled was only part of the larger simulated fight.

Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, the division commander, said during a late July call with reporters that his soldiers took easily to new sensing, striking and protection capabilities, but also were “looking up … and they’re asking questions about the small unmanned aerial systems their seeing.”

It’s a tectonic shift from two decades of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. military had air superiority. Watching for threats from above will require broadly changing the mindset of soldiers and leaders.

Technology Test Bed

At the Maneuver Battle Lab, the EXFOR works in a cavernous, hangar-like facility and in mixed terrain on Fort Moore’s ranges.

Among the equipment the soldiers have tested are the high-speed, light utility Infantry Squad Vehicle; the Silent Tactical Energy Enhanced Dismount (STEED), a manually guided cart soldiers call the wheelbarrow; the Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport (SMET), a remotely operated support vehicle; short- and medium-range reconnaissance drones, including a “marsupial” variety that can carry munitions; and a rubbery dog-bone-like device equipped with a camera that can be tossed into an area and remotely operated to move around and provide audio and video.

When Young and his soldiers received their batch of equipment, they put it together, checked it all out and massively disapproved, he said.

“It was ugly. Everybody was like, there is no way that this is going to work,” Young said. But as they worked with scenarios several times a day for a week, “we started to see, OK, all this stuff actually kind of works together a little more than we thought.”

The EXFOR soldiers are accustomed to receiving high-level visitors, including Rainey and reporters. They have no qualms about telling them like it is, even when it’s lukewarm news.

As an example, in discussing the quadruped, a visually pleasing, four-legged robot resembling a dog that’s designed to perform a variety of tasks, the soldiers’ dislike of the device was an open secret.

“The mobility of it isn’t where it needs to be right now,” Spc. Colton Arford said, explaining that he has seen it fall over and lose connectivity if the operator is more than 15 meters away, “which kind of defeats the purpose.”

“I think on paper, it would seem to have good mobility,” he said. “I just think there’s a gap in where they want it to be and where it actually is right now.”

The manually guided STEED however, has shown great versatility in lightening a load and speeding up travel times for dismounted soldiers with its capacity to move heavy equipment they normally would carry on their own.

But using the autonomous SMET to transport wounded or incapacitated soldiers is where human-machine integration intersects with letting go and trusting the machine to safely get soldiers where they need to go.

It goes back to Sesay’s assertion that with regular training and understanding the robots’ capabilities, soldiers will learn to trust their equipment and even see its benefits.

“I would much prefer to be on a ground robot with two buddies that are guns up … instead of carrying my litter. I’d feel a lot safer that way,” said Pfc. Joseph Marsh, who was selected to join the EXFOR around the same time as Sesay.

As one of the youngest members of the EXFOR, Pfc. Ryan Poore, 21, said with training, he’s become “a whole lot more comfortable” with robotics and the idea of being medically evacuated on the STEED or the SMET.

“My confidence has definitely increased,” Poore said. “The way I would put it, a lot of these [casualty evacuation] things, like the wheelbarrow, it’s just a more convenient way for us to evacuate a casualty. That’s all it is.”

As the EXFOR soldiers continue their experiments, their feedback will provide a real-time stream of information to Futures Command on how to best structure the human-machine integration platoon and how the robotics capabilities should be used, Willis said.

While robots such as the quadruped require more development “in terms of mechanical stuff,” Young said, drones are well along in their usefulness, ease of operation and availability. “Drones could go out to the force now and would be an immediate force multiplier,” Young said. “I mean, it would blow their mind.”