The Army’s adding AI to soldiers’ phones and laptops to swiftly identify enemy threats after Hegseth’s push for new tech
The Army is now outfitting soldiers with artificial intelligence tools to assist with threat identification, according to a new report.
As a result of a $98.9 million contract between the Army and San Francisco tech startup TurbineOne, soldiers will now have AI applications loaded onto their phones, drones, and laptops, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The app reportedly helps soldiers quickly identify threats, such as drone launch sites or concealed enemy positions. Typically, troops on the ground would rely on analysts reviewing data captured from drones, planes, and satellites for that kind of information — but TurbineOne’s app can reportedly provide similar insights.
The technology is being adopted in response to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s directives for the military to purchase more commercial software and drop older military systems in favor of AI and drones.
The TurbineOne tech is being given to one unit at a time as the company continues to gather data and tweak its app based on users’ feedback.
Over the course of one weekend of use, TurbineOne implemented more than 200 software revisions based on user feedback, according to the company’s chief executive, Ian Kalin.
What the tech ultimately does is process data and provide insights based on that data to soldiers in the field.
Army senior executive Andrew Evans told The Wall Street Journal that the service’s goal is to process data 10 to 25 times faster than its enemies. He said that benchmark is reportedly crucial to retaining battlefield superiority.
According to Evans, thanks to drones and other forms of surveillance, no one can hide from each other anymore. Killing will now come down to who has the fastest AI.
“This is the most volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous environment that we have operated in,” Evans said. “Being able to hide, being able to obfuscate our signature — we are losing that advantage. Everyone is losing that advantage.”
Soldiers on the ground will ultimately be the ones to decide how to use the data collected and interpreted by TurbineOne. They can set it to detect specific threats — like drones in the sky or tanks armed with specific weapons — and the app will keep them constantly informed of any changes relevant to their queries as they move about an area of operation.
TurbineOne is reportedly compatible with any LLM. Mainstays in the AI chatbot world — such as Google, xAI, Anthropic, and OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT — were all awarded contracts from the Department of Defense in July to develop models for the military’s use.
Evans said the new tech will be crucial to the military’s operations in environments where communications have been jammed.
“What this does in warfighting is it directly addresses the most strategic and significant threat that we face, which is being cut off from the rear and operating with only the kit that we carry,” he said.
The threat of being cut off isn’t theoretical; battlefield blackouts have become a norm in the war between Russia and Ukraine. That conflict has also shown that using a cellphone or laptop connected to the cloud can alert a soldier’s enemies to their location.
“In the Ukraine war, it’s a bit of a dystopian reality, because if you turn on a cellphone, if you turn on a radio signal, you become a target,” Kalin said.
Prior to launching TurbineOne, Kalin served in the Navy as a counterterrorism officer.
In addition to providing battlefield data to soldiers without requiring a cloud connection, TurbineOne also reportedly has the capability of controlling “drone swarms” that can be programmed to make coordinated attacks on targets.
Ukraine used a drone swarm attack earlier this year — marking the first known use of such a tactic in combat — in an assault on Russian strategic airbases in June.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called the attack “Operation Spider’s Web,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The attack damaged 41 aircraft and destroyed at least 13, according to Ukrainian government reports.
Thus far, TurbineOne has been used in U.S. military training exercises in Europe, at the border with Canada, and in the Pacific.
