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LLM (google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite) summary:
- desert testing: army units tested drones and communication systems during summer training exercises at fort irwin in extreme heat
- equipment failures: high temperatures and strong winds caused servers to overheat, batteries to drain quickly, and drones to lose signals or land prematurely
- modernization push: defense department leadership directed the military to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence and off the shelf startup technology
- operational examples: unmanned boats and low cost offensive drones were deployed in ongoing conflicts to rescue personnel and execute strikes
- bureaucratic hurdles: current and former officials noted that a risk averse culture and slow adaptation hindered the integration of autonomous systems
- vendor evaluation: training events served to test the performance of newly procured hardware against manufacturers sales claims in real world conditions
- communication upgrades: the service invested billions in command and control systems and satellite connectivity to improve battlefield coordination
- human element: senior commanders emphasized that despite technological advancements, military operations remained fundamentally dependent on human decision making
Oct. 10, 2026 5:30 am ET
Under a blistering desert sun, the U.S. Army strained to show it had become a modern, AI-powered fighting force.
Some blamed the heat. It was July in the Mojave Desert, and the thermometer climbed toward 110 degrees. Servers overheated. Batteries died and couldn’t be recharged. Soldiers drenched T-shirts in ice water and draped them over antennas that were on the fritz.
Sgt. Ramontez Bennett’s drone from Anduril Industries was supposed to loiter overhead. Instead, the relentless glare forced it to land. “They gotta do something about it overheating,” he said. Plenty of America’s conflicts have played out in temperatures rivaling this particular July day.
It wasn’t just the sun causing problems. “All it takes is one gust of wind and it’s on the side of a mountain,” he said. Behind the rugged peaks, drones lost their signal.
Next to Bennett, another pilot prepared to launch a drone from Theiss UAV Solutions. After a prolonged wait to charge a drained battery, the aircraft took another 10 minutes to get airborne. Ukrainian soldiers can get a drone of about the same size off the ground in under a minute.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last year threw down the gauntlet with a directive to transform the Army into an AI-powered force equipped with drones and 3-D printers to quickly spin up weapons components, and directed the service to buy more software and startup tech. He instructed the Defense Department to stop looking for perfection in its tech, and buy off-the-shelf products that are good enough, stressing the urgency of modernizing.
America’s investments in such weapons, some of which date to the Biden administration, have slowly begun to change the way it fights. In Iran, a war that has relied largely on older and expensive systems, the U.S. also used an unmanned boat made by defense startup Saronic to rescue a stranded helicopter crew. A drone modeled on Iran’s Shahed has been among the military’s most successful low-cost offensive weapons. The drone, called Lucas, costs $10,000 to $55,000 a unit thanks to an arrangement in which the Pentagon owns the design and farms out production to a group of manufacturers.
Artificial-intelligence tools have also greatly accelerated intelligence analysis and target selection. The rapid evolution of the fighting in Ukraine shows how central such technologies will be to future wars.
But America’s soldiers are still far from reaping the full benefits of cutting-edge autonomous weapons and AI systems, and haven’t been forced by necessity to quickly modernize as militaries like Ukraine’s have in the heat of conflict, current and former national-security officials said. Transforming a land-based fighting force with a history of slow technological adaptation into a nimble organization that makes the most of new innovations has been difficult.
A soldier enters a building during an assault exercise at Fort Irwin. 
A soldier enters a building during an assault exercise at Fort Irwin. 
Soldiers run into position during a combat training exercise. 
Soldiers run into position during a combat training exercise. Startups’ emerging new tech, most of which has never been to war, has at times proven to be too brittle in real-world applications, soldiers said. The Army is also in the throes of upgrading battlefield connectivity and communications, steps that are key to being able to fully capitalize on next-generation weaponry.
The military has held at least five press calls in recent weeks to talk about its modernization efforts. “There is a recognition that the battlefield is changing before our eyes,” Col. Gregory Merkl told reporters on one such call. “We are absolutely dedicated to transformation.”
Fort Irwin
Project Convergence brought 9,700 infantry soldiers to the desert for a 10-day, round-the-clock mock fight against an Army unit called Blackhorse, which stood in for China’s People’s Liberation Army. Media briefing materials billed the three-day July trip as a glimpse “inside the U.S. Army’s AI-enabled battlefield” and an opportunity for its leadership to demonstrate the use of AI apps, a data integration program, aerial and ground drones and sensor-loaded headsets in battle.
In some of the moments meant to spotlight advanced technology on the battlefield, newly procured drones and developmental communication systems failed to perform as intended.
Soldiers flew drones during limited windows and for half the maximum flight time to conserve battery and avoid losing them, and without full autonomy or any AI to assist. Chinese consumer drones could do the manual job a decade ago.
The battle offered the familiar scene of legacy warfare: green-suited soldiers kicking in doors, screaming above gunfire, weighed down with weapons from the last century.
An Army spokesman for Project Convergence said the event was designed to allow for specific units to experiment with drones during pockets of fighting and learn about the tech, not to flood the airspace with autonomous weapons. The event was a way to “fact-check all the vendors that are coming to us” about the veracity of sales pitches from a crop of defense technology firms, said Alex Miller, chief technology officer to the Army’s chief of staff.
Morning light filters through smoke and dust above the mock village at Fort Irwin. 
Morning light filters through smoke and dust above the mock village at Fort Irwin. The Army found during the exercise that the augmented-reality headsets referenced in its media invitation to Fort Irwin showed some deficiencies and the service is uncertain if it would move forward with them, a senior defense official at the training event said. Three companies have won contracts each worth more than $100 million to build the headsets.
While much of the tech there had already been awarded sizable Army contracts, officials and soldiers involved described it as experimental rather than essential new weaponry.
“You take a piece of electronics and lay it out on a hot rock in 109 degree temperatures and try and make it work,” said Lt. Gen. Michael McCurry, one of the senior Army leaders running the event. “We’re seeing some of that.”
An Anduril spokesman said its drone overheated and that it had previously been tested in hot and cold temperatures. Following soldiers’ feedback, the company has prioritized making upgrades to improve the drone’s performance in extreme environments, he said.
Theiss UAV Solutions founder Shawn Theiss said his drone typically launches within three minutes and that he received mostly positive feedback from soldiers at the exercise. Delays sometimes happen if soldiers aren’t trained, or if the communications parts, made by a separate company, have glitches, he said. The Theiss UAV drones there were more than three years old and batteries may not have been at peak performance, which can affect the launch, he said.
Some defense officials said the efforts would bear fruit longer term despite near-term stumbles.
Modernizing the military
Congress has long hammered the Army about modernizing its fighting. Congressional probes and government oversight reports have found that the Army has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on fumbled new weapons programs, and suffered from inadequate training and failures in cybersecurity and data management.
The Ukraine war brought the inadequacies into focus, bringing fully autonomous warfare to the battlefield with a tech proficiency that at times humbled the U.S. During battlefield drills held in Germany earlier this year, Ukraine’s drone operators took out a U.S. armored brigade.
“The tech is moving so quickly that the U.S. military bureaucracy cannot keep up,” said Jonathan Rue, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who played a key role in getting new technology into the Army, and is now a partner at firm MVP Ventures.
A soldier launches a drone. 
A soldier launches a drone. 
One soldier coordinates with another while operating a drone controller. 
One soldier coordinates with another while operating a drone controller. The last major Army transformation came about in the 1980s, when the service pivoted from Vietnam and built the force it would use in the Gulf War. It retrained, reorganized and brought in armored fighting vehicles, attack helicopters and modern air defense systems.
The struggle now is to transform what recently ousted Army Sec. Dan Driscoll has called a “calcified bureaucracy” in preparation for a technologically sophisticated adversary—China. Driscoll departed in September, following disagreements with Hegseth.
Daniel Goure, a former military analyst with the Lexington Institute who has held numerous war college teaching positions and roles in the Defense Department, said the Army’s history of modernization efforts are “almost unblemished by success.” He blames a tradition of risk aversion and a hierarchical organization.
Still, upgrades like the Army’s Next-Generation Command and Control system, used for AI-enabled planning and logistics, are a start. The system, with a $4 billion price tag in this year’s budget, allows troops to move faster and in a more dispersed fashion over longer stretches of battlefield, which is essential in modern conflicts, Army officials say.
Starlink connectivity has meant that for the first time in his 19-year Army career, Lt. Col. Shawn Scott can radio a soldier sitting in an air-conditioned operations center at another end of the base, without cumbersome transmission poles. And new data-sharing technology has cut by two-thirds the time it takes Scott to plan and communicate missions.
The next step is bolstering the reliability of communications and data integration systems so AI-powered weaponry can actually help human fighters out in remote and austere conditions.
Capt. Alex Bayer reviews information on a tablet during a training exercise. 
Capt. Alex Bayer reviews information on a tablet during a training exercise. 
Soldiers maintain a defensive position at Fort Irwin. 
Soldiers maintain a defensive position at Fort Irwin. The Fort Irwin fighting climaxed with a predawn attack on a fabricated city, Razish, a relic of training for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stryker armored combat vehicles rolled down the hills. Smoke trucks attempted to obfuscate the view. Mortar rounds exploded and soldiers moved from one building to the next, firing blank bullets and pausing for the occasional smoke break.
A swarm of five small drones was forced to turn back as three Black Hawk helicopters carrying senior Army officials flew into the same airspace, squandering a rare high-tech moment they had come to see.
“It’d be a very dangerous time for us just to hand over everything to technology,” said Brig. Gen. Daniel Hibner, commander of the Army’s Joint Modernization Command. “It’s very much still a human endeavor.”
A soldier looks out at the terrain during combat training. Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Heather Somerville is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal in San Francisco covering technology and national security. Her articles explore the national-security implications of emerging technology, U.S. efforts to counter China's rise as a technology power, and the relationship between Silicon Valley and the U.S. defense complex.
Heather joined the Journal in 2019 to cover venture capital and technology companies. Before that, she wrote about venture capital and Silicon Valley startups for Reuters and the Mercury News. She was previously a reporter for the Fresno Bee and the Charlotte Observer and wrote about national security for outlets in Washington, D.C.
