New Army Truck Can Hunt Drones WITHOUT a Driver

Small, cheap drones have turned breaching and route-clearance into contested airspace; the Army’s answer is to let the robot do the dangerous work and give it its own close-in air defense.

At a Glance

The Army ran a Project Sandhills 2.0 live-fire with a semi-autonomous Ford F-250 carrying an Edda counter‑UAS shotgun turret at Fort Bragg on August 18, 2026.
Forterra’s AutoDrive stack handled the driving tasks; the 9 Mothers–built Edda turret provided point-defense against small drones, with humans authorizing shots.
Four F‑250s formed the Sandhills 2.0 fleet; two integrated kinetic counter‑UAS to protect breaching vehicles as they deploy obstacle-reduction tools.
Results feed an Army push toward layered counter‑UAS and autonomous breaching that reduces soldier exposure and will continue at major training centers.

What the Army Actually Tested

Project Sandhills 2.0 combined autonomy and point-defense in a single, workmanlike package: a Ford F‑250 pickup outfitted with Forterra’s AutoDrive autonomy system and topped with the Edda counter‑unmanned aircraft system (C‑UAS) turret. Army-released imagery and captions document the setup and the live-fire context: Range 63 at Fort Bragg, August 18, 2026. One image shows the F‑250 “supporting” Sandhills 2.0, explicitly naming the AutoDrive stack and the Edda turret; another captures a Bumblebee V2 quadcopter falling after the turret engaged it during counter‑UAS testing—concrete, visual confirmation that the live-fire event included small‑UAS target work at close range.

Sandhills 2.0 fielded four F‑250s built around Forterra’s data fabric and autonomy software; two were equipped with kinetic C‑UAS from 9 Mothers, the defense firm behind Edda. Described as a remote weapon station with acoustic and visual tracking, Edda cues on small, fast movers and executes human-authorized shotgun engagements—point-defense by design, not area air defense. The Army’s intent was practical: let an autonomous breacher or obstacle‑reduction vehicle defend itself while it works, rather than assigning a separate manned escort for drone swatting.

Mechanics: Autonomy Meets Point Defense at 10–100 Meters

Autonomous breaching is not a theoretical exercise. Breach lanes must be cut under fire, line charges laid and detonated, and debris cleared—all tasks that expose engineers to direct and indirect threats. AutoDrive brings repeatable, supervised autonomy to that mission: waypoint driving, obstacle handling, and coordination with other unmanned systems in a data fabric Forterra has been maturing under successive Sandhills contracts. The C‑UAS layer complements that by covering the most vulnerable envelope—tens of meters out—where micro‑UAS dive, hover for spotting, or drop munitions. A shotgun effector in a stabilized turret makes engineering sense there: its pattern and short time of flight help intercept jittery, low‑signature targets without the over‑penetration risks and backblast considerations of rifle or missile options in close quarters.

Doctrinally, this is the “defeat” end of a detect–identify–decide–defeat loop that Army and NATO literature have pressed into layered practice. Sensors—acoustic arrays, EO/IR, sometimes small radars—establish awareness; algorithms and a human on the loop discriminate; a near‑instantaneous effector closes the geometry. The Army has pursued similar layers on heavier platforms, from AMPV prototypes with integrated C‑UAS to Abrams and Bradley experiments with autonomous weapon stations, all converging on the same operational truth: no single tool covers the spectrum of small‑UAS threats; you need depth and proximity coverage together.

Why Breaching Vehicles Need Their Own Air Umbrella

Breaching concentrates mass, time, and signature—exactly what small drones exploit. An autonomous F‑250 planting a line charge or towing breaching tools becomes a magnet for spotters and loitering munitions. Push the humans off the cab, and you reduce catastrophic risk; add organic point-defense, and you complicate the attacker’s problem further. Sandhills 2.0 squarely targeted that combination. The live-fire ran at a scale appropriate to a prototype series—four trucks, mixed payloads—and paired ground autonomy with a turret expressly tuned for the last 10–100 meters, where most quadcopters and micro‑fixed wings become hardest to hit with conventional rifles yet still too close for effectors designed for standoff.

The approach also aligns with the Army’s broader modernization arc: autonomous breaching systems positioned to replace or augment legacy methods like MICLIC and clearing rollers; counter‑UAS processes standardized across echelons; and mission command that treats UAS defense as a routine, integrated function rather than an ad hoc bolt‑on. Sandhills 2.0 and its follow‑on events feed that convergence, with test data informing tactics, techniques, and procedures as much as hardware maturation.

What Counts as Progress Here

With experiments of this kind, the signal is in specific, observable integration milestones. First, the Army publicly tied Forterra’s autonomous mission system to a named C‑UAS turret on a specific date and range, then documented actual target defeats—small, but decisive, steps from PowerPoint to dirt. Second, the vehicle set was plural—four trucks—allowing variations in payload and teaming across semi‑autonomous breaching tasks and C‑UAS roles. Third, the Army scheduled continued assessment at the National Training Center, indicating the goal is not a one‑off demo but iterative evaluation in force‑on‑force conditions where drones complicate every mission thread.

Equally important is what the setup did not attempt: it did not pretend to replace higher‑tier air defense or electronic attack; it did not claim autonomy without supervision; it did not outsource lethal decisions to software. Instead, it pursued a bounded, useful niche—organic, human‑authorized protection against cheap drones at the moment and place where a breacher is busiest and least able to self‑guard.

The U.S. Army tested a semi-autonomous Ford F-250 equipped with the Edda counter-drone turret during Project Sandhills 2.0 at Fort Bragg on August 18.

The vehicle combines Forterra’s AutoDrive autonomy system with the Edda turret from 9 Mothers. The system is intended to… pic.twitter.com/zdFBWLCno0

— Drone Wars (@Drone_Wars_) August 23, 2026

Implications for Field Units and Industry

For line units, the message is practical. Expect breaching concepts of operations to assume drone harassment as a baseline and to embed point-defense at the vehicle level. Expect more autonomous haulers and tool carriers, not as science projects but as risk‑shifting workhorses that cut exposure at chokepoints. And expect training centers to normalize combined arms against drones—engineers, EW, air defense, and maneuver commanders rehearsing layered C‑UAS as routinely as smoke and suppression.

For industry, Sandhills 2.0 underscores the premium on modularity and integration. A commercial truck chassis, an autonomy stack that plugs into Army data fabrics, and a compact, stabilized turret that accepts different sensors and shotguns create a fast‑cycle testbed. Vendors who can slot into that architecture—swapping sensors, effectors, and decision aids without bespoke rewiring—will move faster than those selling monoliths. The Army’s investment cadence suggests more of these mashups, not fewer, as small‑UAS threats continue to proliferate and evolve.