The U.S. Army experimented with more than 110 systems for seven weeks as part of Project Convergence 21—the service’s contribution to the Pentagon’s overall Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort—to inform future acquisition plans. The event, largely focused at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, brought together sensors from all military services to find new ways to share data, using autonomy and artificial intelligence to target weapons on the ground and in the air more quickly. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth says she expects experiments such as this to last for another 10 years to shape what the service buys and how it fights. “Frankly, we went 20 years as a joint force without a lot of experimentation, without paying a lot of attention to innovation. . . . As a result, countries like China made a lot of progress in those intervening years. So we have quite a bit still of experimentation and innovation to do,” she says.
