American Bradley fighting vehicles were visible on the horizon as they raced towards the city. Smoke, deployed to conceal movement, curled around the outskirts. The assault forces, preparing to assault the enemy fortress, gathered at the northern end, avoiding barbed wire, cars and concrete blocks: enemy obstacles intended to slow the assault. The urban assault, part of a simulated conflict against a formidable adversary, followed days of combat. The US Army exercise tested soldiers as they moved through a city caught in conflict, forcing them to clear streets and buildings as they fought. The fight also had another layer. Although not on a scale like the fighters in Ukraine, soldiers were integrating new technologies, including drones and software, to determine if these systems made a difference in the way they saw, felt and engaged the enemy. However, traditional combat skills remain critical to combat operations. At the Army’s Project Capstone Convergence exercise at Fort Irwin in California this summer, nearly 10,000 soldiers gathered to experiment with new weapons and technology while waging a simulated war. The enemy forces consisted of troops from Irwin’s 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, known as the “Blackhorse.” Throughout the hot, dusty Mojave Desert, soldiers struggled with the effects of the heat on themselves and their equipment. Troops systematically cleared areas of the city and targeted key locations. US Army photo by Sgt. William Rogers A little over an hour before the assault forces stormed the training city, Blackhorse drones were flying overhead, scanning the area. Inside a building, a unit commander asked a drone operator flying a Black Widow quadcopter to use it to assess vehicles entering the city. The drone could fly up to four kilometers away, expanding the unit’s vision beyond what soldiers could see from the ground. “I can find with my UAS [uncrewed aerial system]I am able to fix with fires, and then I finish with my AT [anti-tank] weapons systems,” Capt. Mohamed Elmaola of the 4th Infantry Division told Business Insider. Want more Business Insider in your news? Add BI on Google to make our reports easier to find when you’re looking for what matters. While remotely piloted drones proved advantageous for early surveillance operations, they were only used sparingly once fighting moved into the city, occasionally flying to scout positions, terrain and movement. Soldiers said the use cases of the drones had changed as the exercise progressed. A ground robot, an unmanned ground vehicle called NOMAD, had been used outside the city limits earlier that morning, but was not used in the assault. “What we really want to be able to do is not just saturate the environment with a bunch of technology” because “that’s so distracting” that soldiers can’t train efficiently and effectively, Brigadier General Daniel Hibner, head of the Army’s Joint Modernization Command, told Business. Insider. The simulated city, which the army calls Razish, was extensive, with winding streets, buildings of different heights, underground tunnels and hidden positions. During the training exercise, two key objectives for the assault forces were the prison and a large palace in the center of the city and they began to check the buildings for enemies. The dismounted infantry and the Bradley crews work together in combat, protecting each other as they advance. face more distant threats while dismounted soldiers armed with close-quarters combat clear buildings and eliminate threats to nearby vehicles. “You don’t want your Bradleys to overwhelm your dismounted infantry,” one soldier told Business Insider, explaining that dismounted enemy troops armed with anti-vehicle weapons will “just shoot at your Bradley.” Bradley vehicle or a dismounted soldier running across the street. At one point, enemy forces successfully hit a Bradley. The turret fired, indicating that the vehicle had been destroyed. In many respects, this type of combat would not have been unknown to veterans of the Global War on Terrorism. The sounds of fighting came in waves, louder when the assault forces stormed the jail and even in the quietest moments, bursts of gunfire could be heard in the distance. Soldiers placed on rooftops or in windows looked up, aimed and fired their weapons before crouching down, the soldiers stopped fighting and sat down or stayed where they were. Hours into the fight for the city, some of the assault forces gathered inside and next to a low building just across the street from the gates surrounding the palace. Another opened his end-user device, a smartphone mounted on his chest, and looked at a map, reading the building number aloud. The urban assault was the climax of both soldiers’ training and testing of new technologies. Photo by Sergeant William Rogers. The soldier was using the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control prototype, or NGC2, a battlefield network enabled by software and artificial intelligence. NGC2 was conducted in a large-scale combat scenario, marking the latest iteration of a series of previous tests that had been conducted at Fort Carson in Colorado, where the Army’s 4th Infantry Division developed NGC2 with industry partners. One soldier said he was using NGC2 to see where friendly forces were located within the city and where enemy forces might be hiding. Another soldier said connection problems, whether problems with the NGC2 system or the result of electronic warfare and jamming, had left it virtually unusable. of success and failure was exactly what Army leaders said they wanted to see in the exercise, characterizing it as an opportunity to gather feedback on what worked and what didn’t. “We’re going to have some failures here in the desert, and that’s good,” Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, said in a call days after the exercise concluded. “If there’s something here that doesn’t live up to what’s advertised, we’ll abandon it.” and the challenges of training while experimenting with new technology. Soldiers had to answer big questions about whether the experimental systems were actually useful while also being judged on basics like whether they cleared or marked buildings properly. The training environment gave the Army a demanding place to test new technology, but the experimentation also gave soldiers one more thing to handle while trying to win a fight.
