Fort Hood Engineers Test Drones, Robotic Vehicles to Protect Soldiers in Breaches

Soldiers of the 36th Engineer Brigade at Fort Hood faced a stark arithmetic problem: combat engineers have roughly a 50% chance of dying during a combined-arms breach. On March 5, the brigade ran a breaching-operations training event using more than a dozen unmanned and robotic systems designed to change those odds entirely.

The exercise, part of the Army's broader technology innovation initiative, put robots at the front of the breach line so soldiers could operate from a safe distance. Maj. Michael J. Caddigan, operations officer for the 36th Engineer Brigade, framed the goal plainly. "Soldiers employ advanced technology for the most hazardous missions in the same manner they would during manned operations," he said. "The goal is for robots to lead the initial wave, tackling the most dangerous tasks, like breaching obstacles."

The centerpiece of the demonstration was the M5 RACER, a green rubber-tracked autonomous vehicle the brigade acquired last year through a retired Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program. Two of the vehicles came to the unit through that transfer. Each M5 RACER pulls a trailer loaded with a mine-clearing line charge that soldiers remotely detonate, allowing them to blast through obstacle fields without anyone physically on the breach. During training, operators navigated the RACER around a line of pyramid-shaped anti-tank obstacles called "dragon's teeth," the kind of barrier the brigade recreated from historical obstacle lines used in World War II, Desert Storm, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

A TRV-150 unmanned aircraft, capable of hauling up to 150 pounds, was fitted with a smoke machine and tested to generate a smokescreen during a training scenario. Separately, on March 7, Pfc. Noah Marraccini of the 20th Engineer Battalion conducted intelligence and reconnaissance for a breaching site using a Skydio UAV, landing the drone after a successful recon run. The Fort Hood Sentinel noted that testing of the Skydio system is feeding into new standard operating procedures the Army is developing for emerging drone technology.

Spc. James Clubb, who had no prior experience with drones or robotics when he joined the 36th Engineer Brigade, learned to operate the RACER in a few hours. The speed of that learning curve matters to him personally. "As a combat engineer, I have approximately 8-seconds of survival while on the breach and this completely takes me out of that to where my survivability rate to where I get to go home and see my family, it skyrockets," Clubb said. He described the machine's operation as straightforward: "So, the entire machine is entirely autonomous. Meaning, you see a GPS map and from there, you put in a waypoint of where you want it to go and you click execute and it's kind of off doing its own thing."

The scale of the experiment extended well beyond the RACER and TRV-150. Caddigan said the unit is "incorporating 10-plus additional technologies as part of a partnership with Army Applications Lab," building on systems the brigade already had. The March 5 training fell under the Machine Assisted Rugged Soldier, or MARS, program. Some of the equipment tested that day was not available to be discussed or photographed publicly.

Observers from the Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force watched portions of the exercise from a nearby cliff overlooking the dusty Fort Hood training ground. The brigade is continuing to develop doctrine around these systems, with new standard operating procedures for drone technology still in progress as the integration work expands into large-scale maneuver training.