How the US military is learning to fight everyone’s new weapons

(NewsNation) — Fort Polk in western Louisiana is where soldiers go to “play war.”

It’s home to the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC), where troops prepare for combat, especially before deploying. The goal of the Army’s combat training centers is to replicate real-world warfare, and that increasingly means preparing for conflict shaped by drones and artificial intelligence.

Bryan Pickens, a veteran who served 14 combat deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq and has more than 20 years of military service in U.S. Special Operations, said the U.S. has a lot of catching up to do.

“I often say we are on a rowboat while our enemies are escaping us on a jet ski,” Pickens said. “The Global War on Terror skills prepared us to fight dirt farmers. Not our peer enemies.” 

Having also supported Ukraine’s current war effort against Russia, Pickens now focuses on training U.S. and NATO forces on current warfare and modernizing the force.

The Pentagon announced a new Autonomous Warfare Command, led by a four-star general to scale AI, robotics and low-cost drone capabilities across the military.

NewsNation has learned exclusively that another goal of that push is the launch of an integrated technology system for the Army that works across equipment from different manufacturers and is designed to speed up training and cut costs. The first testing ground for this is the JRTC in partnership with Forterra, a defense tech company focused on autonomous ground systems that is now expanding how it can serve the U.S. military.

Empowering the ‘bad guys’ to help the ‘good guys’ get better

To simulate realistic combat, the 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed Geronimo, serves as the resident opposing force and plays the enemy against every brigade that rotates through the training center.

Soldiers in Geronimo are given tools that mimic what........

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