- The U.S. Army tested a self-driving Ford F-250 fitted with an Edda counter-drone turret during a Project Sandhills 2.0 live-fire exercise at Fort Bragg on August 18, 2026. - The vehicle combines Forterra's AutoDrive autonomy system with a 9 Mothers-built turret designed to shoot down fast-moving drones at 10 to 100 meters. A Ford F-250 that can drive itself carried a shotgun-armed drone-killing turret onto a live-fire range at Fort Bragg on August 18, 2026, the latest test in a U.S. Army program built to get engineers out of the blast radius during breaching operations. The vehicle, tested at Range 63 as part of Project Sandhills 2.0, runs on the Forterra AutoDrive autonomy stack and carries an Edda counter-unmanned aircraft system turret built by Austin-based 9 Mothers. The Army described the vehicle as carrying modular systems to support automated obstacle reduction while limiting soldiers’ exposure to direct enemy fire. Obstacle reduction is engineer-speak for clearing lanes through minefields, wire, and other barriers so troops and vehicles can move forward. It is dangerous, deliberate work, and it is exactly the kind of task the Army wants a machine doing instead of a soldier. The Edda turret weighs about 23 kg (50 pounds) and detects drones acoustically, listening for the sound signature of small rotors rather than relying on radar or radio-frequency sensors that a drone can detect in return. Once it picks up a target, an onboard visual tracking system takes over and the turret engages with a shotgun effector, built to hit fast-moving drones roughly 7 inches across at ranges of 10 to 100 m (33 to 328 feet). Because the system stays passive until it fires, it does not broadcast a signal an adversary could use to locate the vehicle first. Sandhills 2.0 grew out of an earlier