Trying to see into the future can be a fool’s game. Even some of history’s finest minds have been made a laughing stock attempting it. Albert Einstein once declared nuclear power would never be obtainable, while back in 1977 Ken Olsen, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, claimed there was “no reason for anyone to want a computer in their home”.
The armed forces and the defence boffins who support them have to look into their crystal balls on a regular basis, however. And billions are spent in research , trials and test beds to try and ensure their predictions don’t come back to haunt them. That’s why the army now puts so much stock in exercises such as Project Convergence, held annually at Fort Irwin in California.
It’s a living lab of more than 1,000 square miles where sweat and calories are expended along with gigabytes and bandwidth. Far from prying eyes, man and machine are free to experiment and exploit an uncluttered electromagnetic spectrum, restricted airspace, mock villages and a dedicated opposition force.
This package’s latest iteration, Capstone 5, presented British troops, who were operating alongside Australian, French and US forces, with a golden opportunity to hone new battlegroup warfighting tactics that have been developed over 18 months in a collaboration between the Army’s Experimentation and Trials Group (ETG) and, among others, the Futures directorate.
“It’s become obvious that we must train and fight in three dimensions,” explains the ETG’s Maj Adam Szczerbiuk (RA).
“Land manoeuvre now covers the electromagnetic spectrum, the near-surface and the ground.
“Much of the underlying foundational doctrine for how we fight as an army has not changed, but this piece of work shifts our focus to synchronise our efforts in those three areas.”
The UK battlegroup was armed with robotic autonomous systems (RAS) and led by troops from 2nd Battalion, The Royal Yorkshire Regiment – the ETG’s ‘in-house’ experimentation unit – supplemented by personnel from 5th Battalion, The Rifles and an Australian RAS company that was integrated into the same network.
Together, they trialled the new doctrine by engaging a peer enemy – in this case the 11th Armoured Cavalry Regiment, the US National Training Centre’s world-class opfor, who were configured to represent a realistic Russian threat.
It called for a layered approach using forward lines of sensors, robotics systems and troops to detect and respond to enemy advances in turn.
“Our basic goal was in line with the US Army’s Futures Command mantra of ‘no blood in first contact’,” says Maj Andy Wright (RA), an RAS specialist with the ETG.
“We were trying to prioritise machines rather than humans to do the fighting where possible.
“Our forward line of sensors were both ground and air based – things like static cameras, seismic sensors and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) equipped with Istar assets.
“These sensors triggered layered lethal effectors, such as loitering munitions, armed UAS, Brimstone ground-launched missiles and mortars before the enemy reached our forward line of troops.”
Completing three missions three times in a range of scenarios across this huge training area meant the battlegroup was able to fully test and validate the new procedures.
“We found that our RAS battlegroup proved far more lethal than a standard formation would have been in the same situation,” continues Maj Wright. “One of the US Army observer-mentors commented that he’d witnessed 11 US brigade rotations through this exercise and we were the first battlegroup to hold Razish, one of the main urban centres, even though we were up against a larger opposing force.
“I think the results are bound to have an influence on the way the British Army fights in the future.”
One of the major lessons learned, among many, was the importance of managing the network that links the various sensors and weapons systems together.
“We found the S-band frequency range, which most unmanned systems operate in, became very congested,” notes Maj Wright. “We had US and French brigades in the area and we were all trying to use the same frequencies to control our systems.
“The interference meant lots of UAS couldn’t operate at their maximum range at times and would flick into ‘come home’ mode and return to the ground station.
“So one conclusion we’ve reached is that having greater knowledge and resilience around control of the electromagnetic spectrum will be vital to operational success in future.”
The ETG has identified that this is an area where developments in AI machine learning could make a huge difference in years to come to help reduce dependency on uninterrupted access to this crucial frequency band.
“Once equipped with AI, a robotic platform can be given a mission and it will be able to work out its own way of achieving it rather than have a human controlling it all the time,” explains Maj Wright.
“It will only have to communicate in short bursts at certain points to check in and then continue with the task, interacting with a controller only when it has found something of interest or needs a decision to be made.”
Another vital lesson learnt was around survivability.
“One thing we’ll be reporting back during our debrief to Army HQ is that we must hunt first and defend last in terms of dealing with opposing UAS,” says Maj Szczerbiuk. “In other words, we must go after their ground stations as a priority rather than focus our resources on shooting down enemy drones because they are almost infinite in number.”
Through various sensors, including UAS, the UK battlegroup could identify locations of ground control stations and destroy them.
“We knocked them out multiple times using first-person view drones, which we found to be particularly effective for this,” adds Maj Wright. “This cat-and-mouse pursuit has added another dimension to modern conflict, and both sides are now finding this in Ukraine, where they are going after UAS pilots and other skilled people in ground stations who are a lot harder to replace than cheap drones.”
How much of the ETG’s new doctrine will be officially adopted by the Field Army remains to be seen. The overall picture is hugely complex and there are numerous elements at play in this highly automated battlespace that haven’t even been touched upon here. For now, it remains a series of recommendations based upon some seriously high-quality experimentation.
Regardless of the outcome, the modernisation effort will continue in support of the chief of the general staff’s increased fighting power goals for 2027 and 2030. The ETG is set to deploy RAS-enabled recce strike sub-units with 11 Brigade on Exercise Bull Storm in Kenya next month and later in the year with Australia’s 1st Armoured Regiment on Exercise Talisman Sabre.
Additionally, the formation is already planning participation in Project Convergence Capstone 6 in 2026, when it will be trialling a new light recce strike battlegroup concept with RAS-equipped companies operating independent missions within their own battlespaces.
Will that prove to be more suited for tomorrow’s challenges than the current recce strike set-ups? It depends on how accurate defence’s crystal ball-gazing has been. Ukraine is still demonstrating that making predictions about how warfare will develop is extremely difficult.
Who would have thought even a decade ago that miniature helicopters would come to dominate the battlefield?
One thing we do know, though, is that insights from the ETG’s experiments emerging on exercises like Project Convergence will continue to ensure the UK armed forces are as prepared as they can be for the conflicts that potentially lie ahead.
