The U.S. Army's July Project Convergence exercise at Fort Irwin, California, put drones, communications gear and AI-related systems through a 10-day mock battle in the Mojave Desert. The Wall Street Journal reported that the event exposed both equipment limits and signs of progress in the Army's modernization effort.
The desert found the weak points
With temperatures approaching 110 degrees, servers overheated, batteries died and antennas malfunctioned. An Anduril drone was forced to land after overheating, while mountains blocked signals to other aircraft. Another drone from Theiss UAV Solutions took 10 minutes to launch after a battery-charging delay.
Soldiers flew drones only during limited windows and for half their maximum flight time to conserve batteries and reduce the risk of losing them. The aircraft operated without full autonomy or AI assistance.
Anduril said it had prioritized better performance in extreme environments after soldiers' feedback. Theiss said its drones normally launch within three minutes and cited possible training gaps, glitches in third-party communications components and aging batteries as factors in the delay.
An experiment, not a finished battlefield
Project Convergence involved 9,700 infantry soldiers in a mock fight against an Army unit standing in for China's People's Liberation Army. An Army spokesman said the exercise was intended to let specific units experiment with drones during portions of the fighting, rather than fill the airspace with autonomous weapons. Army Chief Technology Officer Alex Miller described the event as a way to test vendors' claims.
Other systems showed more encouraging results, according to Army officials. The service's $4 billion Next-Generation Command and Control system supports AI-enabled planning and logistics. Starlink improved communications across the base, while new data-sharing technology cut one commander's mission-planning and communication time by two-thirds.
The exercise suggested that reliable connectivity and data integration remain prerequisites for AI-enabled weapons to help soldiers in remote and harsh conditions.
