AI Systems Indirectly Endangering US Troops, Turning Them Into Easy Targets for Enemy Drones
American soldiers need generators to run their radios and sensors, but the noise and heat can help enemy drones find them.
As drones and electronic warfare gear move down to small field teams, the Army and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit are turning to companies that build hybrid battery systems so troops can shut generators off.
“There’s no way to turn that off, or you’re kind of faced with this really bad decision, which is, you know, turn off the generator, but then lose all of my communications, all of my sensors, right, or leave it on and be a target,” Chariot Defense CEO Adam Warmoth, whose company makes hybrid power systems, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Republican North Carolina Rep. Pat Harrigan, who served in Afghanistan as an Army officer and sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said a unit’s efforts to stay hidden are wasted once an enemy drone senses the warmth of its generator.
“You’ve just given away your position,” he said in a statement to the DCNF.
Harrigan added that he is “absolutely interested in funding hybrid generators and battery systems that can take some of that risk off our soldiers” in the next defense bill.
“I want to know how much quieter they are, how long they can operate without resupply, and whether they can handle the demands of a combat deployment,” he said.
Harrigan led Democratic nominee Ashley Bell by about 3,000 votes in the Nov. 3 race for the 10th Congressional District, according to unofficial returns from the North Carolina State Board of Elections. He is set to hang on to his seat despite the nationwide blue tsunami causing a cascade of Democratic flips in the state.
The military’s standard-issue power sources “generate noticeable acoustic and thermal signatures,” which can make it harder for units to operate quietly, the Defense Innovation Unit wrote in a request for portable battery systems that closed in March.
“Generators are loud. They create a lot of visual signature. They create a lot of thermal signature, and we have to get past that,” Army Chief Technology Officer Alex Miller said at a defense industry conference near Detroit in August, Breaking Defense reported.
Cummins, which makes the service’s Advanced Medium Mobile Power Source generators, did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Warmoth, whose company is based in San Bruno, California, said one big lesson from Ukraine “is just how much electronic capability is needed.”
Command posts, sensors and counter-drone systems used to run from relatively safe areas in the rear, according to Warmoth.
“That’s all now getting pushed down to these mobile distributed units,” he added.
Not long ago, a platoon or company had only a couple of radios to keep charged, Warmoth noted. Now units are leaving their trailer generators behind because towing slows them down.
“That heat and noise that’s making them a target” is the other reason, he said.
Air conditioners, lasers and radars create “really high demands that end up sizing your generator,” Warmoth said.
“You end up bringing, say, a 30 kilowatt generator, which is 2,300 pounds, even though your average demand for power is maybe only two kilowatts,” he said.
An Army paper published in August 2025 found the same thing. During a training exercise for a 101st Airborne Division brigade, its 15- and 30-kilowatt generators frequently ran at less than 10 percent of capacity, the paper said.
“The problem is they never do the maintenance in the field on the generators because they can’t turn them off,” Warmoth said. “Because if they turn them off, they lose all their systems.”
Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and director of the national security reform program at the Stimson Center, said he saw the challenge firsthand as a Marine Corps tank officer in Iraq in 2007. At least eight big diesel generators powered Camp Fallujah, and his platoon escorted fuel convoys that kept them running.
“They’re big, they’re loud, and they’re necessary because the U.S. military travels with a lot of things that require electricity,” Grazier told the DCNF.
Artificial intelligence systems need far more power than traditional ones, so “this problem is only going to get worse,” he said.
Defense Logistics Agency Energy, which supplies the military’s fuel, sold about 152.2 million gallons for the Army’s needs in the first nine months of 2026, the agency said in a statement to the DCNF. It referred questions about generator use to the service.
Chariot’s answer is a battery system that stores power from the vehicles and generators units already have, Warmoth said.
The smaller Amphora 24 hooks into the jump-start port on U.S. and NATO military vehicles and charges while they drive, he said. When a vehicle “gets where it’s going, it can turn its engine off and run all the system silently.”
“We can charge off a vehicle in say three hours,” he added.
For a command post running basic communications and sensing gear, “you’re looking at say six to eight hours” of silent operation, Warmoth said.
Chariot sees about 50 percent fuel savings, though it “depends a little bit on the load,” he said.
“You’re looking at double the runtime just based on that fuel savings,” Warmoth added.
Because the system handles power surges, units “can actually bring a smaller generator, or no generator at all, and just use the vehicle as the generator,” he noted, adding that this leaves room to carry more fuel.
“A unit operating with Chariot equipment could potentially operate for 300 hours,” Warmoth said, using the example of a unit that could run 100 hours on generators and batteries alone.
Separately, trucks rigged to send power from their engines have cut fuel use in Army testing. In an Army experiment called Project Convergence, the trucks used nearly 50 percent less fuel than the three to six “underused standalone generator sets” units had been running, according to an article the service published in fall 2024.
Chariot announced in August that the Defense Innovation Unit had awarded it a contract to supply Amphora systems to Army brigades over 12 months, with deployments planned to begin in fall 2026.
Most of the money goes to buying systems that active-duty units take into the field and on deployments, Warmoth said. The aim is to learn how much power units really use, since “that data realistically doesn’t exist.”
John Webber, New Use Energy’s vice president of sales, said in a statement to the DCNF that he visited two 101st Airborne Division teams using the company’s portable power units in the field at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in October.
He said each SunCase charged from one of the Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicles could save about 44 gallons of diesel a week by the company’s own estimate, compared with idling the truck around the clock. The figure comes from one team whose equipment drew about 220 watts, he said.
“In short we would only add 3 hours of vehicle idle time every 24 hours,” Webber added.
If delivered fuel runs $8 a gallon, a SunCase that costs about $5,000 would pay for itself in roughly 14 weeks of field use, by Webber’s math.
So far, Army units have bought portable power a few at a time, New Use Energy CEO Paul Shmotolokha said in a statement to the DCNF.
“There have not been heavy buys of our product category in any formal program to date,” he said.
Lasers and similar weapons “are extremely energy intensive, which presents a logistics problem in particular for forward-deployed Army units relying on generators for power,” Wilson Beaver, senior policy advisor for defense budgeting and NATO policy at the Heritage Foundation, and co-author Ka’Von Johnson wrote in a June 2025 issue brief.
“When you’re standing outside the eJLTV in silent drive mode, all you hear is gravel,” Oshkosh Defense said of its hybrid Joint Light Tactical Vehicle in an Oct. 16 statement to the DCNF.
The company has shown the eJLTV, which offers silent drive and silent watch, to customers at home and abroad since its 2022 launch, an Oshkosh Defense representative said in a later statement to the DCNF.
Oshkosh also offers an exportable power kit for its Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement truck that draws more than 40 kilowatts from the vehicle’s built-in capacity, or upward of 80 with stacked inverters, according to the representative.
“The MTVR exportable power kit can replace a towed generator completely or pair with a towed generator to supplement additional power when needed,” the representative added.
Neither the eJLTV nor the truck kit has been fielded, the representative said when asked about the Army and the Marine Corps.
“However, both services have expressed interest in this type of capability,” the representative noted.
“Replacing legacy generators with battery-inverter systems reduces thermal and acoustic detection risks,” the August 2025 Army paper said.
In a 2024 training rotation in the Pacific, small teams from a 25th Infantry Division brigade “operated for 56 to 96 hours” on one battery module and one power distribution module “without relying on generators or vehicles,” according to the paper.
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