In this episode of Micro Journeys: Inside Access, host Daniel Marrujo travels to Tantan, Morocco, embedded alongside the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team at African Lion — one of the largest multinational military exercises in the world. Daniel sits down with Captain Vincent Gasparri, a West Point-trained nuclear engineer who leads the Bayonet Innovation Team, a unit dedicated full-time to integrating commercial technology into one of the US Army’s most forward-deployed brigades. From FPV drone strikes to autonomous ground vehicles operating in real time across the Sahara Desert, this episode pulls back the curtain on what the future of warfare actually looks like when it leaves the lab and hits the field.
War is changing — and the data coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is accelerating that change faster than most people realize. The proliferation of small unmanned systems, the integration of artificial intelligence, and the demand for faster commander decision-making are no longer theoretical challenges being studied in laboratories. They are problems being solved in the field, in the heat, in the dust, and under pressure. Captain Gasparri and his team of seven are at the center of that effort, stress-testing commercial technology in austere environments and iterating in real time to ensure soldiers will actually use what they are given.
The solution is not about replacing the soldier — it is about empowering the soldier, keeping humans firmly in the loop, and building systems that serve the formation rather than the other way around.