The Defense Department is adapting to the modern reality of warfare, putting much of its research and development into becoming drone-dominant, The Hill reported.
The U.S. Army and Undersecretary of Defense Emil Michael gave NewsNation an exclusive look at the department’s high-tech training center just outside Indianapolis. Muscatatuck Training Center consists of a sunken city, a hospital, and crumbling buildings to build what the military has labeled the “Disneyland of the warfighter.”
Thanks to recent regional conflicts, much of the focus over the past three years has been on unmanned ariel vehicles.
Drones have risen to the top of military priorities since the outset of the Russia-Ukraine war. The ubiquity of UAVs on the 21 century battlefield has given the soldier an opportunity to be a part of their design.
“Usually, you deliver a big weapons system to your troop, they read the manuals, they understand how to use them,” Michael said. “Now we’re going to rely on the warfighters to be part of the innovation loop. It has to be modular, or it has to be able to change both software and hardware consistently.”
The new initiative has brought the top technology minds out of Silicon Valley and into middle America to win over the next big Pentagon contract. Uzi Ibrahim, vice president of strategic operations at Sentien Robotics said the new business will force the company to build quickly.
“Now we’re up to seven to eight people and we’re continuing to grow, so maybe with this recent order we may have to scale a little bit faster,” he said.
The opportunity for fast and lucrative government contracts has convinced a once previously hesitant industry to take notice.
“You know, when I was in Silicon Valley, there was some hesitance to cooperate with the U.S. military. That is gone,” said Michael, a former Uber executive. “Those days are over.”
Michael said the Trump administration is working to keep up with adversaries by removing much of the bureaucratic hurdles to get approvals.
“You’ve got to cut the red tape out” when it comes to drone production, he said. “A lot of the regulations around what you could build and how you could build it and even how you could test it were limited in the last administration.”
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