Under a blistering desert sun, the U.S. Army strained to show it had become a modern, AI-powered fighting force.
Some blamed the heat. It was July in the Mojave Desert, and the thermometer climbed toward 110 degrees. Servers overheated. Batteries died and couldn’t be recharged. Soldiers drenched T-shirts in ice water and draped them over antennas that were on the fritz.
Sgt. Ramontez Bennett’s drone from Anduril Industries was supposed to loiter overhead. Instead, the relentless glare forced it to land. “They gotta do something about it overheating,” he said. Plenty of America’s conflicts have played out in temperatures rivaling this particular July day.
The future is autonomous and scary.
