{"id":282,"date":"2025-09-02T18:17:38","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T16:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/?p=282"},"modified":"2025-06-08T11:41:49","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T09:41:49","slug":"how-in-house-tech-and-soldier-tinkering-is-changing-the-army","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/?p=282","title":{"rendered":"How in-house tech and soldier tinkering is changing the Army"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new Army-made software application is allowing soldiers to identify a target and send a fire mission in under a minute when it used to take 15 minutes. Those same soldiers have rigged cheap drones with a cheap, off-the-shelf circuit board and sensor to make electronic decoys of their command posts, throwing enemy fires off target.<\/p>\n

This brave new world in Army electronic warfare was on display recently during the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division\u2019s rotation this month at the Joint Readiness Training Center.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

During the 101\u2032s recent rotation, soldiers used a new app called \u201cShrike,\u201d which identifies targets with minimal information and spits out a ready-to-go, call-for-fire mission.<\/p>\n

The app is the brainchild of Army Futures Command, featuring software that uses an artificial intelligence capability mounted on any fielded drone. Each drone\u2019s small circuit board draws on a large-language model backbone.<\/p>\n

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Soldiers flew the drone with the attached device and software over their enemy\u2019s motor pool to scan their adversary\u2019s vehicles.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

More tech tricks are in the toolkit of soldiers headed to training and deployment as part of the Army\u2019s Transformation in Contact, an effort focused on injecting five years\u2019 worth of modernization into three separate brigade combat teams, including brigades from the 101st, the\u00a025th Infantry Division\u00a0and the 10th Mountain Division.<\/p>\n

The Army\u2019s professional\u00a0<\/b>opposition force, or \u201cenemy\u201d troops, in combat training center rotations such as the one here use homemade sensors to detect an electromagnetic \u201creading\u201d or \u201csnapshot\u201d of the Army units they fight.<\/p>\n

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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 \u201ccommand post laptop\u201d or \u201cGarmin smartwatch,\u201d tricking the adversary into thinking that what they\u2019re scanning is an actual headquarters.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The trick worked.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe enemy spent 50% of their artillery against the dirt, where we had those decoys,\u201d 2nd Brigade commander Col. James Stultz told reporters here.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2019s reconnaissance drones.<\/p>\n

During the first week of the exercise, an enemy drone locked onto the brigade\u2019s mobile, Humvee-based command post.<\/p>\n

Soldiers with the brigade set up a kind of invisible \u201cnet\u201d of counter-drone defense gear and tried to lure the enemy drone into the \u201cnet\u201d using their command post as bait.<\/p>\n

The colonel said they didn\u2019t trap the drone, but the soldiers did manage to shake the drone off the Humvee\u2019s tail and avoid a strike that would have taken out the headquarters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new Army-made software application is allowing soldiers to identify a target and send a fire mission in under a minute when it used to take 15 minutes. Those same […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,28],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-army","category-military-tech","tag-military-tech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/in-house-tech-and-soldier.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282\/revisions\/284"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}