Australian soldiers with a ground drone in California at Project Convergence this month. Photo: Australian Defence Force
New Zealand has joined military exercises in the Californian desert testing the world's most lethal drones, even as the Pentagon moves to fully embrace AI.
It comes at the same time as Ukrainian soldiers fleeing Russia's Kursk region have spoken of being "hunted down" by two or three drones at a time. In return, Ukrainians are deploying 'dragon drones' that spew molten metal at 4400 degrees on top of the Russian front lines, before crashing.
The nature of modern war is changing fast, analysts say.
Australian researcher Mick Ryan - who has just returned from his fifth visit to Ukraine - warns that the rapid adaptation of war technology is "now occurring at a pace that I believe is largely incomprehensible to the majority of politicians and defence procurement bureaucrats in the west."
These politicans and bureaucrats had to wake up and catch up, Ryan said.
In a US Army video from the Mojave Desert, air and ground drones were launched while a voiceover intoned: "Human-machine integrators... will provide us the initiative to win on the future battlefield."
The Americans have at least nine types of robot they have been testing. Some are for surveillance and others are for targeting, while others are lethal.
The aim was to "blend soldiers with robotic and autonomous vehicles".
"No blood for first contact," is the Americans' new motto.
"Shame on us if we make first contact with a human again. Let's trade robots for that," said one commander.
The other big push was to integrate allies more. New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the Philippines and France are all taking part this month and next in the US Army's main high-tech testing exercise,Project Convergence-Capstone 5 (PC-CP5) at five sites around the Pacific.
"Integration of our forces is key to winning in the future," the US said.
Drones deliver hit
The Ukraine war shows the inverse - drones are not taking the hit, they are delivering it.
Commanders there have estimated drones were dealing out 70 percent of deaths and casualties, the New York Times reported in an article headlined, 'Drones now rule the battlefield'.
The integration is now going further with AI, at a fast pace.
About the same time Project Convergence began, the Pentagon announced its new Thunderforge project to embed generative AI into "operational decision-making" for the first time.
"Thunderforge marks a decisive shift toward AI-powered, data-driven warfare... respond to emerging challenges at machine speed ," it said.
This will impact first on the increasingly tense Indo-Pacific, where INDOPACOM US command is squared off against China.
Autonomous rocket launcher tested in California desert during Project Convergence. Photo: US Army
Project Convergence - which has exercises going on in Australia and the Philippines - has previously talked up how it helped the allies improve the speed of the "kill web", while US Space Force commanders have spoken of the threat from China's "kill web", where satellites can target any US asset in the Pacific, with kamikaze drones or missiles linked in.
Thunderforge would speed up those systems further.
The system would see Silicon Valley firm Scale AI using generative AI from Microsoft to help commanders make decisions, Pentagon reports said.
It will also use software from Anduril, a company suddenly vaulted into prime defence contractor territory, which building a factory in Ohio almost as large as the Pentagon building to manufacture tens of thousands of military drones a year.
Thunderforge represented a dramatic turnaround from a year ago, when tech start-ups were reported to be trying to sell a "cautious Pentagon on AI".
'Picking a fight?'
An international summit in Seoul last year called for caution, but lacked any legal force, and startling new research also pointed to the need for it.
The study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Futures Lab prompted one commentator to ask: "Is AI trying to pick a fight?"
CSIS used 400 scenarios and 60,000 questions in the first major benchmarking study of how generative AI approached international relations and foreign policy decisionmaking.
"The results reveal a concerning trend," researchers said.
"Some widely used AI models exhibit a marked bias toward escalation in crisis scenarios compared to others.
"This finding has serious strategic implications. If AI models systematically favour escalation, they could skew policy analysis toward more aggressive responses in conflict-prone situations, increasing the risk of miscalculation in high-stakes geopolitical environments."
New Zealand has signed up to a NATO agreement and a US declaration on "responsible" use of AI and "emerging, disruptive" technologies (EDT) in the military.
At the same time, the government has called on local high-tech firms to help the NZDF develop EDTs. It also shut down an advisory group on autonomous weapons last year.
The high-tech push is another strain on defence spending across the world.
May's Budget will test how far the Beehive can push defence spending towards two percent of GDP. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, on his visit to India this week, once again pledged a "scaling up" on defence.
The NZ Defence Force (NZDF) has been going along with the US-led high-tech and integration charge as far as its military tech, strained budgets and lack of manpower allow.
It has been at three Project Convergence exercises. After the second last year, where Global Domination' exercises focused on what the Americans dubbed "kill chains" and "kill webs", the local brass told RNZ that the NZDF "does not use the term 'kill web'".
The push to integrate allies may yet collide with US President Donald Trump's plans, but for now more than a billion dollars a year is being spent on joint exercises.
The NZDF is desperate to retain inter-operability with both the US and Australia, which has called drones "a key card in our pack" and is very big on pushing EDTs.
But it has made slow going of its network-enabled army project, and while it is lining up to invest a billion dollars in data and digital, current projects face a lot of delays.
A big aerial drone project in 2022-23 reportedly spent more than $20m but at a time when prices were still high - up to $300,000 each.
The war in Ukraine has sent prices plummeting and innovations skyrocketing, to as little as $700 for kamikaze and $30,000 for surveillance drones.
The Pentagon's newest contracts, revealed on Friday, are for prototypes of single-use drones, at about $35,000-$120,000. They can fly 100-1000km - and might soon flood the Pacific if the US Navy has its way.
Ryan said the war in Ukraine had forced rapid adaptation onto the combatants, with the Russians only keeping up by copying its opponent's drone advances in bulk.
Militaries had to sit up and take notice, he said.
"Adaptation is central to learning about the enemy and improving the capacity of friendly forces to negate an adversary's advantages in technology, tactics, people and generation of smart ideas and massed capability over time.
"This occurs in war, but must start in peacetime."
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