• US Army officials say laser weapons require surprisingly little protective gear.
• Troops should stay at least 10 feet from targets and never look into the laser.
• The Army wants lasers that work on different vehicles and can be learned in minutes.

US Army officials say the safety protocols for soldiers using lasers are surprisingly simple: don't stand too close to the target and don't look into the weapon.

Directed-energy weapons are seeing more operational use, particularly at the US southern border, where the Army has employed them against cartel-linked drones. The service envisions these systems operating on different vehicles and being easy for soldiers to learn and use safely.

At the Association of the United States Army, or AUSA, convention last week in Washington, DC, officials and industry partners spoke on developments in directed-energy weapons.

Asked about personal protective equipment, or PPE, and any concerns about specular reflection from lasers, Kirk Williams, chief engineer of the Army's directed energy project office, said the rules were similar in some respects to those for other weapons.

"Well, the short and sweet of that answer is: unless you're within ten feet of the target, a specular reflection is eye-safe, so the soldiers don't need the eye protection from the laser," he said, explaining that "it's like any other weapons system: don't look into it."

"We tell the soldiers the same thing about an M-16. Don't look down the barrel. Same thing with lasers, don't look down the barrel."

Specular reflections occur when light bounces off a surface. In the case of a laser weapon, reflected light can bounce off a targeted vehicle or drone. While the target absorbs most of the energy, some reflections might stray and cause eye or skin damage to soldiers near the target.

Williams said that part of the reason the Army likes these weapons is their relatively low risk to soldiers and the limited need for protective gear. "They are safe," he said, adding that "the great thing about a laser is we can also turn them off instantaneously."

The weapons also have safeguards that shut them down if there is a risk of hitting something other than the intended target.

During the panel, Williams and others also talked about the Army's priorities for deploying more laser weapons, an area of growing importance for the Army and the broader US military.

Brig. Gen. Guy Yelverton, the capability program executive for defensive fires, said the service wants to integrate high-energy lasers onto "any vehicle in the motorpool." He said the Army's Enduring High Energy Laser, or E-HEL, is mounted on a sled, allowing it to be integrated onto multiple types of vehicles.

The E-HEL is an Army directed-energy weapon program using AeroVironment's LOCUST laser system.

Yelverton said that making weapons compatible with different vehicles and usable by soldiers across military specialties will allow the Army to deploy them more widely.

The general said that this flexibility would allow the Army to deploy laser weapons "across all Army formations," giving commanders more options for where to put them and which soldiers should operate them.

"It's a great dilemma to have," he said.

Officials also said part of disseminating the weapons is making them easy to train on. "Most of our training sessions, we can train somebody in like, five minutes, to be able to use this system and start shooting things down," Williams said, adding that using standard controllers like those for an Xbox made it intuitive.

The Army's testing of laser weapons and other counter-drone systems at the southern border has reinforced the idea that the US will need layered defenses to counter a range of drone threats. Drug cartels are increasingly using drones to support operations, and the Army has already used lasers to shoot some down.

• The US Army is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI that speeds up battlefield decision-making.
• Striveworks' Chariot program is a core AI component of the Army's new NGC2 battlefield software.
• The contract deal will bring Chariot to more Army units as the Pentagon invests heavily in AI.

The US Army is making a major investment in expanding the use of an artificial intelligence platform to help soldiers process battlefield intelligence and make decisions faster.

The $700 million deal between the Army and Striveworks is a tenfold increase from the initial enterprise contract and will bring the company's Chariot AI platform to more units and missions. Chariot is also at the core of the Army's new warfighting software, Next Generation Command and Control, or NGC2.

On Thursday, Striveworks announced the expanded agreement after months of growing demand for Chariot. Jim Rebesco, cofounder and CEO of Striveworks, told Business Insider that soldiers across specialties, from logistics to artillery, have been using the technology for different tasks.

Chariot serves as a hub for AI decision-making, deploying agents to process data and provide human users with information and next steps that align with their jobs, priorities, and commander decisions.

"Those folks are constantly receiving this data coming in from radio, reports, from sensors, from drones," Rebesco explained, "and the first job is to decide: is that a target worth paying attention to? Is it a military vehicle? Is it a tank? Is it something valuable? If so, does that meet with what my commander's priorities are?"

Chariot helps soldiers work through those questions, analyzing incoming data, checking relevant doctrine and legal standards, and comparing potential targets against the commander's priorities.

"It does everything that a team of four to 10 individuals would do over a period of about an hour; it compresses that down into minutes," Rebesco said.

Commanders and soldiers at the Army's 4th Infantry Division, for example, have used Chariot and provided feedback to Striveworks. At Project Convergence Capstone 6 at Fort Irwin, California, Chariot helped soldiers analyze and process more potential targets.

Rebesco said feedback from those exercises and others has been implemented quickly to improve the program's accuracy, speed, and the quality of information provided to soldiers.

Chariot is a key AI component of NGC2, the Army's new command-and-control program developed and tested with soldiers and industry partners in Colorado and Hawaii over the past year. After Project Convergence Capstone, the Army decided to transition NGC2 into the next phase of scaling, pushing it to I Corps at Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Next steps will include making the technology available to more soldiers and ensuring it is sufficiently rugged to operate in harsh, dispersed environments, including the Indo-Pacific. Chariot also works with other military systems, including Maven and the Integrated Battle Command System, with the same data and agentic processes.

The Pentagon and the different military services are spending billions on AI to speed up battlefield decisions, analyze vast amounts of sensor data, and anticipate ammunition shortages and maintenance needs. Another goal is to lighten cognitive burdens on human users by helping soldiers make sense of more information, faster.

"We know the biggest risk to our national security and our national defense is not moving too fast. It's not moving fast enough," former Army secretary Dan Driscoll said after Project Convergence Capstone in July.

"The side that can sense a target, process the data, and deliver a kinetic effect the fastest wins."