In the history of war, you can have the best weapons and military forces but all of them will be destroyed if supported by poor logistics. This is what happened to the Wehrmacht in St Petersburg, the Russians in the Ukraine and Hannibal during the Second Punic War. Therefore the army is always thinking of the fastest and safest way to supply the needs of the personnel on the battlefield.
The Aerial Reconfigurable Embedded System (ARES) project is a DARPA project that originally was to develop a flying car. The ARES focus was later transformed into a VTOL drone that could carry cargo and wounded soldiers on the battlefield. The contract to build the ARES prototype was awarded to Piasecki Aircraft and last week it made its first flight. In the first test it flew and floated for a minute before returning to land.
It has two shielded propellers attached to short wings. Two helicopter engines are modified to power the ARES and therefore will not have the short operating range issues faced by battery-powered cargo drones.
The M4 cargo module used by the United States Army can be installed on the bottom of the ARES. It can be modified to carry equipment, weapons, food and even injured soldiers.
DARPA targets that ARES can carry up to 1360 kilograms of cargo, fly like a light aircraft, have a compact design to make it easy to take to the battlefield, swaterbang capability and can perform missions even from an open area that is not available.
The United States' approach differs from that of China, which this year successfully tested its own self-driving cargo drone. The drone built by Sichuan Tengden Sci-tech Innovation Co is in the shape of a regular airplane with a capacity of carrying 2 tons of cargo. It was designed to carry supplies to military outposts built in the South China Sea.