Having also supported Ukraine’s current war effort against Russia, Pickens now focuses on training U.S. and NATO forces on current warfare and modernizing the force.
The Pentagon announced a new Autonomous Warfare Command, led by a four-star general to scale AI, robotics and low-cost drone capabilities across the military.
NewsNation has learned exclusively that another goal of that push is the launch of an integrated technology system for the Army that works across equipment from different manufacturers and is designed to speed up training and cut costs. The first testing ground for this is the JRTC in partnership with Forterra, a defense tech company focused on autonomous ground systems that is now expanding how they can serve the U.S. military.
To simulate realistic combat, the 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed Geronimo, serves as the resident opposing force and plays the enemy against every brigade that rotates through the training center. Soldiers in Geronimo are given tools that mimic what enemies of the U.S. have or are expected to have, including drones, communications and intelligence information, said Logan Morris, chairman of Fort Polk Progress. Morris is also a former civilian aide to the secretary of the Army.
Dealing with a variety of autonomous enemy weapons systems, whether they’re coming from Russia, Iran, China or elsewhere, means the military needs different technologies that run on individual platforms. Soldiers then must learn how to use each platform and process the data separately before it all gets integrated, something that takes time and money.
The new system aims to reduce both. Phil Cotter, Forterra’s head of growth, sustainment and shaping operations, said, “What Geronimo is good at is flummoxing these units that come down [to Fort Polk]. They shouldn't have to also be burdened with trying to learn 50 different systems, 50 different battery chargers, 50 different handheld controllers and range limitations” to successfully recreate what the enemy may do.
The platform, known as OASIS-Fabric and OneLink, pulls in information from a range of communications technologies and other platforms and processes it at scale. Cotter explains, “They are the middleware and data layer that kind of allow these systems to all speak the same language.”
Scott Sanders, Forterra's chief growth officer, said the goal is for a tired, stressed 18-year-old on the battlefield to be able to plan a mission without waiting on higher headquarters.
The soldier “should be able to do all the mission autonomy planning right there without having to reach back to higher headquarters to do it … you can reduce cost, enhance interoperability, and increase the speed at which decisions get made at tactical edge," he said.
Morris explains the goal is not just to give this capability to Geronimo but also to those battalions who go down to train, aka the “good guys.” He said it stands out because it "integrates and evaluates capabilities from other companies, vendors and contractors,” rather than interfering with each other. That would let other defense companies' platforms work together as one larger system.
If the system proves successful, the plan is to bring it to all of the Army's training centers and eventually to combat operations.
Lt. Col. Trevor Jones, commander of Geronimo, wrote the Army needs to change how it trains and fights, learning what works and what doesn’t by “failing fast.”
“The risk of being outclassed by a rival military’s transformation is very real with the current pace of technological change," Jones said.
Forterra acknowledges there’s no guarantee this new platform will work perfectly, and certainly not right away. But Jones’ argument for experimentation is that if the U.S. military doesn’t try new ways of operating, it will fall even farther behind its enemies who are innovating in this space and have a headstart.
This new technology has been tested to some degree. In the past year, Forterra has sent 105 autonomous vehicles to Eastern Europe to facilitate Ukraine’s fight. Cotter says some of the underlying technology used in those vehicles, and that’s been improved upon in battle, is some of the same tech that undergirds what Geronimo will be receiving.
Sanders says they successfully tested out the system in Ukraine and because of that, “We said, ‘Let's roll this out broadly to the U.S. military, one training center at a time.’"
When asked how secure the data coming into their platform will be and whether there’s a risk for it to get in the hands of America’s enemies, Cotter says they are equipped to mitigate that because they’re “familiar with how to handle government data and not put any of that at risk to adversaries.” He points to the fact that Forterra has the first major ground autonomy program of record for the Department of War, which means it has already gone through an Authority to Operate process.
Time will tell what gaps need to be filled and what other precautions need to be taken. For now, this platform appears to be a step toward warfare readiness. Congressman Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, says, “We can't let our adversaries get ahead of us, and they are ahead of us if we don't catch up real fast,” but he says he’s “excited that we can protect our war fighters” with new technology.