New Army Truck Can Hunt Drones WITHOUT a Driver

Autonomous breaching vehicles are moving from slide decks to range dirt, and the Army’s latest Sandhills 2.0 trials show why: pairing a self-driving engineer truck with a close-in counter‑drone turret turns a single-purpose breacher into a survivable, multi-mission node that can clear obstacles and defend itself under the small‑UAS threat that now defines modern battlefields.

At a Glance

The Army ran a semi-autonomous Ford F‑250 with Forterra’s AutoDrive and an Edda counter‑UAS turret in live‑fire testing at Fort Bragg on August 18, 2026.
Sandhills 2.0 fields four F‑250s as an autonomy testbed; two carry kinetic C‑UAS turrets from 9 Mothers to provide point defense against small drones.
DVIDS imagery shows the Edda turret engaging a Bumblebee V2 drone during the exercise, validating close‑range defeat at test scale.
The program’s aim is practical: reduce soldier exposure during obstacle breaching while layering counter‑UAS protection into the same platform.

What Was Tested: A Breacher That Can Shoot Back at Drones

Project Sandhills 2.0 is an Army prototyping effort using commercial trucks as fast-cycle autonomy carriers for engineer missions like obstacle reduction and line-charge deployment. In August 2026 at Fort Bragg’s Range 63, the Army put a semi‑autonomous Ford F‑250 equipped with Forterra’s AutoDrive through live‑fire scenarios—critically, with a 9 Mothers “Edda” counter‑UAS turret mounted in the bed. Official DVIDS captions identify the vehicle, autonomy stack, turret, location, and date, and depict the system supporting the event. Separate imagery documents the Edda turret engaging a Bumblebee V2 small UAS during the test, illustrating point‑defense engagement at short range. The Army’s near-term intent is pragmatic: use autonomy to push people back from mine belts and obstacles, while giving the unmanned breacher a way to survive ubiquitous quadcopters and loitering threats that otherwise stalk slow, predictable engineer assets.

Janes’ reporting fills in structure around the testbed: Sandhills 2.0 comprises four Ford F‑250s running Forterra’s data fabric and AutoDrive, with two trucks carrying 9 Mothers’ kinetic C‑UAS systems. Edda itself is a remote weapon station that fuses acoustic and visual tracking, then executes a human‑authorized shot—a classic “detect, identify, decide, defeat” loop compressed to tens of meters where shotguns and dense patterns excel.

How the Stack Works: Autonomy Up Front, Layered Defense on Top

Mechanically and conceptually, the Sandhills truck is simple by design. AutoDrive handles low‑speed navigation along preplanned routes, obstacle avoidance, and choreographed engineer tasks; the truck is a carrier for breaching payloads, not a maneuver force in its own right. The C‑UAS layer sits orthogonal to that mission: a compact turret with electro‑optical and acoustic sensing to cue, track, and stabilize a close‑range shotgun pattern against a small, fast drone. A human remains in the loop to authorize fire, which satisfies both safety protocols and the doctrinal insistence that lethal effectors answer to a commander’s judgment. This pairing is well tuned to the threat reality engineers face today. Breachers move slowly, announce themselves with line charges and dozers, and are priority targets for spotter drones arcing at 10–100 meters—exactly the band where a stabilized spread can deliver terminal effect with minimal collateral risk, and where RF defeat or long‑range guns are least reliable.

Army and NATO counter‑UAS frameworks emphasize layering: sensing across multiple modalities; classification good enough to cut false alarms; decision aids that compress timelines; and a menu of effectors from jamming to kinetics. On a truck-sized breacher, space, weight, and power narrow that menu, making a light, stabilized kinetic point‑defense turret attractive as the last layer while higher‑tier detection and soft‑kill live elsewhere in the formation. The Sandhills configuration embodies that logic at a practical scale.

Why a Ford F‑250: Commercial Chassis as Rapid Prototyping Platforms

Using a commercial pickup is not a gimmick; it is a deliberate prototyping strategy. Autonomy stacks mature fastest on abundant, supportable platforms with stable CAN buses, plentiful spare parts, and known dynamics. Forterra’s contract language underscores the approach: deliver “fully integrated autonomous mission systems” on F‑250s to automate zone clearing and line‑charge tasks, while integrating partner technologies for threat identification and defeat. The Army has done this before with robotic applique kits on stock utility vehicles; what differentiates Sandhills is the integration of breaching workflows—route prep, charge placement, obstacle reduction—with self‑defense under drone pressure, all orchestrated on a single, replaceable truck.

There is also a training and logistics dividend. Engineer soldiers already operate and maintain commercial and militarized trucks; adding an autonomy kit and a compact turret is an incremental skill step, not a wholesale requalification. And for a mission inherently attritable—breaching under fire—fielding capability on a chassis you can buy and replace quickly is a feature, not a compromise.

What the August Event Demonstrated—and What It Didn’t

At Fort Bragg, the team demonstrated the key ingredients of point defense at the breacher: onboard sensing, target queuing, human‑in‑the‑loop release, and kinetic defeat of a representative small drone, all while the vehicle fulfilled its engineer role. The DVIDS photo series captures both the configuration and an engagement sequence. Trade and defense reporting around the event aligns on core facts—four trucks, Forterra autonomy, two kinetic Edda turrets from 9 Mothers, and an explicit link to breaching survivability. The Army has telegraphed continued evaluation, taking the F‑250 to the National Training Center next to see how this behavior holds inside large‑scale force‑on‑force problems where deconfliction, rules of fire, and electromagnetic frictions matter as much as marksmanship.

As with any prototyping series, the public record centers on configuration and vignettes rather than exhaustive scorecards: it shows a live‑fire event with a functioning system and a documented engagement, not a formal operational test report with probabilities of kill by aspect, false‑alarm rates, or mean time between failures. That is normal at this stage and does not diminish the basic claim: the Army tested a semi‑autonomous breaching truck with an integrated close‑range C‑UAS turret, and it worked in the scenario shown.

Where It Fits in the Counter‑Drone Trendline

Sandhills 2.0 sits in a broader Army push to harden everything from command posts to combat vehicles against class‑1/2 UAS. Industry prototypes have been trialed on armored platforms; doctrine work has codified the detect‑identify‑decide‑defeat sequence; and formations are experimenting with mixes of RF effects, optics, and kinetics appropriate to platform and echelon. The distinctive Sandhills contribution is to move that logic into the engineer breach—arguably one of the most targetable mission sets—using a modular, attritable truck that can carry both the breaching payload and a last‑ditch turret.

If the NTC rotation confirms what Range 63 suggested, expect the next iterations to focus on integration details that make or break field utility: positive identification aids to minimize nuisance fire, standardized control stations so one operator can manage autonomy and turret without cognitive overload, and data fabric tie‑ins so the breacher’s sensors feed the battalion’s air picture. Those are solvable engineering problems; the August trial shows the tactical idea is sound.

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

Bottom Line

The Army’s self‑driving Ford F‑250 with a shotgun‑equipped Edda turret is not a stunt; it is a coherent response to a known vulnerability. Breachers must get close, they will be hunted by drones at close ranges, and autonomy is the surest way to shift risk off soldiers while keeping pace. Sandhills 2.0 demonstrates that a commercial chassis can host both the breaching brain and the last‑layer bite—and that the two can operate together under live‑fire conditions. The next milestone is translating that proof into repeatable, doctrine‑friendly practice at scale.