FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. — The Army Futures Command Maneuver Support Battle Lab is winding down this year’s Maneuver Support and Protection Integration eXperiments and Army Application Lab assessments, in which warfighters conducted simulated battlefield experiments with 14 emerging technologies from May 5 to 16, 2025, at locations across Fort Leonard Wood.
“Protection, though largely attributed to the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence, is everyone’s responsibility,” said Kyle Henry, MSBL Experimentation Branch chief and one of the key organizers of the event.
According to Henry, MSPIX puts the latest tools in the hands of Soldiers while also giving capability developers and the science community credible and validated operational experiment venues for their conceptual and materiel development.
“Engineers and scientists can get lost behind their computer screens and become narrow sighted within the confines of their labs. Their ideas of how something might benefit a Soldier in real world applications are often biased and skewed,” Henry said. “Bringing their capabilities — often their life’s work — out into the field with the Soldiers who may become the end-user provides a reality check for all involved.”
MSPIX participants include both government labs and private industry.
“The vast majority of technology providers are not under contract with the government and pay-to-play, meaning they bring their technology and support to us at no cost. Through coordination with Army Test and Evaluation Command and MSCoE, we can put these capabilities into the hands of Soldiers, something that is mutually beneficial, at a relatively low cost to the taxpayer,” Henry explained.
AAL’s assessments focused on robotic breaching and terrain shaping operations, while MSPIX tested several unmanned and autonomous technologies.
About 50 U.S. Army Forces Command Soldiers from Fort Leonard Wood; Fort Cavazos, Texas; Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Carson, Colorado; and Vicenza, Italy, took part in the assessments.
Some of the experiments had Soldiers controlling unmanned drones, vehicles and boats traversing air, land and water.
Sgt. Mariano Negron, a 12C, or bridge crewmember, with the 74th Multi-Role Bridge Company at Fort Cavazos, spent much of May 13 at Training Area 250’s lake using a system that allowed him to control a bridge erection boat, commonly called a BEB, from a handheld controller.
He said he regularly uses BEBs to build bridges, but not with a remote control.
“I am used to using handheld controllers to play games and it is similar to that. I picked it up easily. It’s like driving a remote-controlled car,” Negron said.
The system can be fitted to existing vessels already in the Army’s inventory to facilitate remote control or autonomous operation.
“We could use this to build bridges without having Soldiers enter the water,” Negron said. “If we needed to remain covered but also needed to bridge a gap to transport troops or cargo we could with this technology.”
Negron said it felt good to be able to provide guidance to the system’s creators.
“We operate these boats all the time. We know how to make these boats do what we need them to do to complete our mission. I have been able to give them feedback that I hope will improve this technology if we get it someday in the future,” Negron said.
Capt. Adam Robinson, an experimentation officer with the Maneuver Support Capability Development Integration Directorate of AFC at Fort Leonard Wood, supervised the testing of seven technologies at Training Area 401.
“We are running platoon style lanes to test the remote breaching and terrain shaping capabilities of these technologies,” Robinson said. “We are giving a platoon leader, a platoon sergeant and a section of combat engineers a mission to complete with these new technologies and watching how they use the technology to execute.”
Robinson said he was impressed by watching how the Soldiers operated a robotically controlled utility terrain vehicle.
“The way it can move and track is pretty impressive,” Robinson said. “The engineers are using them to shape terrain, but as a MP, I would use it for surveillance or resupply. It has a variety of applications.”
Other technologies assessed the capabilities of autonomous track loaders for dig, dump and fill operations; autonomous biological critical area disinfection; a mobile sensing system designed to detect the movement of targets and provide visual imaging; equipment delivering a broad-spectrum electromagnetic pulse during breaching operations; and bioreporters created to detect nerve agents for standoff chemical threat detection.
By Melissa Buckley, Fort Leonard Wood Public Affairs Office
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