FOLA, W.Va. (AP) — As Spot, Boston Dynamics’ dog-like quadruped robot, nimbly paced its means throughout rocky terrain, a big unmanned aerial car silently hovered 100 toes overhead.

In the space, a pair of AH-64 Apache helicopters might be seen orbiting above the ridgeline. Somewhere within the forest under, 220 troopers from the elite a hundred and first Airborne Division, who had been airlifted to a few onsite touchdown zones, had been collaborating in a coaching state of affairs. Their mission: Locate and destroy an enemy’s air protection system.

DIRT Days 23 was in full swing April 20 on the Fola Experimentation Facility, a former Consol Energy floor mine advanced that produced 105 million tons of coal earlier than closing in 2012. Later repurposed as a navy coaching website by the West Virginia National Guard, the positioning is now operated in partnership with the Civil-Military Innovation Institute, or CMI2, a nonprofit primarily based in Morgantown.

The weeklong Driving Innovation in Realistic Training occasion aimed to contain troopers in growing and field-testing new techniques and expertise whereas collaborating in difficult, reasonable coaching workouts. An preliminary DIRT Days occasion happened on the Fola website final summer season.

“DIRT Days is all about soldier-driven innovation,” mentioned Mitch Kusmier, a vp at CMI2 and a colonel within the Army Reserve.

“We curate the problems soldiers encounter with equipment in the field and then team up with WVU, the Army Research Laboratory and other partners to come up with solutions that are field-tested and proven to work,” he mentioned.

The thought is to keep away from sending newly designed technology and equipment into the sector with out enter from the individuals who shall be utilizing it.

“When I was in Iraq, sometimes a container would show up full of gear designed to solve problems we didn’t know we had,” Kusmier mentioned.

Retired Maj. Gen. Buff Blount, who commanded the third Infantry Division when it led the three-week cost to seize Baghdad in 2003, was readily available to watch the exercise at Fola.

“You don’t want to send experimental gear into the field,” he mentioned. “We owe it to our soldiers to provide them with proven technology.”

Among gear being discipline examined at Fola final week was Saab’s Force-on-Force Training System-Next, through which troopers put on laser-activated, sensor-equipped vests throughout simulated enemy actions to permit their actions and actions to be monitored and recorded for post-exercise critiquing.

“We love Fola,” mentioned David Rees, director of coaching at Saab’s protection and safety division. “You have a huge, open piece of terrain as well all these steep slopes and wooded areas. It’s a very unique and challenging site for training and testing.”

Other gear being examined final week included:

♦ An Advanced Dynamic Spectrum Reconnaissance system, developed at Vanderbilt University, that integrates and mechanically tunes legacy Army radios to accommodate the operation of distant sensor networks for detecting enemy presence.

♦ A Mobile Immediate Need Engineering Resource, or MINER, unit — a containerized, self-powered store construction outfitted with 3-D printers and diverse instruments to restore gear within the discipline.

♦ A brand new soldier-created machine gun ammunition bag system designed to switch the apply of cramming belts of ammo into commonplace rucksacks, typically making them tough to steadiness and sluggish to unload.

The new ammo bag, designed to serve M240 machine weapons and nearing the manufacturing stage, could also be low-tech, nevertheless it “can almost cut in half the time it takes to get a gun on a tripod and ready to fire,” mentioned Lt. Col. Dale Marrou, a battalion commander with the a hundred and first Airborne. “And it all came from one captain with an idea.”

Demonstrations of recent expertise additionally included utilizing an unarmed aerial car to make 150-pound resupply drops of MREs and ammunition.

Marrou mentioned the DIRT Days occasion offered “a fabulous opportunity to work with newly developed technology and identify technology we want to be developed.” As a website for coaching workouts, Fola gives a terrain combine that “can’t be replicated at Fort Campbell,” the a hundred and first Airborne’s dwelling base in Kentucky, he mentioned.

In addition to the 220 troopers from the a hundred and first Airborne, a further 80 or so troops from the 82nd Airborne Division took half in DIRT Days.