The US Bradley Fighting Vehicles were visible on the horizon as they raced toward the city. Smoke, deployed to conceal movement, formed wisps around the outskirts. Assault forces, preparing to storm the enemy stronghold, gathered on the northern edge, navigating barbed wire, cars, and concrete blocks — enemy obstacles meant to slow the assault down.
The urban assault, part of a simulated conflict against a formidable peer adversary, followed days of combat.
The US Army exercise tested soldiers on moving through a city caught in conflict, pushing them to clear streets and buildings while fighting. The fight also had another layer. Though not at scale the way combatants in Ukraine are, soldiers were integrating new technologies, including drones and software, to determine whether these systems made a difference in how they saw, sensed, and engaged the enemy.
Traditional warfighting skills remain central to combat operations though.
At the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone exercise at Fort Irwin in California this summer, close to 10,000 soldiers gathered to experiment with new weapons and technology while fighting a mock war. Enemy forces consisted of troops from Irwin’s 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, known as “Blackhorse.”
Across the hot, dusty Mojave Desert, soldiers grappled with the heat’s effects on themselves and their equipment.
US Army photo by Sgt. William Rogers
A little over an hour before assault forces breached the training city, Blackhorse drones were flying above, scouting the area.
Inside a building, a unit commander asked a drone operator flying a Black Widow quadcopter to use it to assess vehicles pushing into the city. The drone could fly up to four kilometers away, extending the unit’s view beyond what soldiers could see from the ground.
“I’m able to find with my UAS [uncrewed aerial system], I’m able to fix with fires, and then I finish with my AT [anti-tank] weapons systems,” Capt. Mohamed Elmaola with the 4th Infantry Division told Business Insider.
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While remotely piloted uncrewed aircraft proved advantageous for early surveillance operations, they were used only sparingly once the fighting moved into the city, occasionally flying above to scout positions, terrain, and movement. Soldiers said that the use cases for the drones had changed as the exercise went on, with the focus shifting toward the on-the-ground fight.
One ground robot, an uncrewed ground vehicle called the NOMAD, had been put to use outside the city limits earlier that morning, but it didn’t see use 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 becomes so distracting” that soldiers can’t train efficiently and effectively, Brig. Gen. Daniel Hibner, head of the Army Joint Modernization Command, told Business Insider.
The simulated city, which the Army calls Razish, was sprawling, 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 jail and a large palace at the center of the city.
US Army photo by Pvt. Philip Banaszak
As the two opposing forces clashed inside the training city, troops dismounted from their fighting vehicles and began checking buildings for enemies. Dismounted infantry and Bradley crews work together in combat, with each protecting the other as they advance.
Bradleys equipped with heavier weaponry engage threats farther away while soldiers on foot armed for close-in combat clear buildings and eliminate threats to the vehicles nearby.
“You don’t want your Bradleys to outpace your dismounted infantry,” one soldier told Business Insider, explaining that dismounted enemy troops armed with anti-vehicle weaponry will “just shoot your Bradley.”
Enemy forces hid in alleys and on the top floors of buildings, occasionally taking a shot at a gunner exposed atop a Bradley vehicle or a dismounted soldier running across the street. At one point, enemy forces successfully hit a Bradley. The turret shot up, signaling that the vehicle had been destroyed. In many respects, this kind of fighting wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to veterans of the Global War on Terror.
The sounds of the fighting came in waves, loudest when assault forces raided the jail and palace. Even in quieter moments, bursts of gunfire could be heard in the distance.
Soldiers positioned on rooftops or in windows would peek up, aim, and fire their weapons before ducking back down. If “killed,” soldiers would stop fighting and sit or stand where they were.
Hours into the fight for the city, some of the assault forces gathered inside and alongside a low building just across the street from the gates surrounding the palace. They were assessing whether they had enough ammunition to keep fighting.
One asked where they were located and whether any friendly forces were around them. Another opened his End User Device, a smartphone mounted to his chest, and checked out a map, reading off the building number aloud.
US Army photo by Sgt. William Rogers
The soldier was using the Army’s prototype Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, a software- and artificial intelligence-enabled battlefield network.
At Project Convergence Capstone, troops were examining how NGC2 performed in a large-scale combat scenario, marking the latest iteration of a series of tests. Prior tests had taken place 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 that connection issues, either problems with the NGC2 system or the result of electronic warfare and jamming, had left it mostly unusable.
That mix of success and failure was exactly what Army leaders said they wanted to see at the exercise, characterizing it as a chance to gather feedback on what worked and what didn’t.
“We’re gonna have some failures out here in the desert, and that’s good,” Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army vice chief of staff, said on a call days after the exercise concluded. “If there is something out here that’s not living up to what has been advertised, we’re going to walk away from that.”
The urban assault showed both the advantages and the challenges of training while experimenting with new technology.
Soldiers had to answer big questions about whether experimental systems were actually useful while still being judged on basics such as whether they properly cleared or marked buildings.
The training environment gave the Army a demanding place to test new technology, but the experimentation also gave soldiers one more thing to manage while trying to win a fight.