U.S. Army evaluates ISV-based autonomous mortar system in Philippines

U.S. Army soldiers evaluated an autonomous 81mm mortar system mounted on an Infantry Squad Vehicle during a live-fire exercise at Fort Magsaysay in the Philippines.

The exercise was part of Balikatan 2026, the annual U.S.-Philippine combined arms exercise that has become one of the Indo-Pacific’s most tactically substantive training events. The soldiers conducting the evaluation belong to the Multi-Purpose Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division — a Hawaii-based unit that operates regularly in the Pacific theater and whose assessment of a system in this environment carries direct relevance to the kind of expeditionary operations the Army is planning for in the region.

The system under evaluation is the Scorpion Light 81mm mobile mortar, developed by Global Military Products under the Army’s Soldier Enhancement Program. The SEP is the Army’s mechanism for rapidly fielding mature commercial and developmental technologies to soldiers for evaluation, accelerating the path from promising capability to assessed field performance without waiting for a full formal acquisition program. The Scorpion’s appearance at Balikatan 2026 in a live-fire evaluation configuration signals that the system has progressed past early demonstration and into the kind of operational assessment that informs procurement decisions.

The performance specifications that define the Scorpion’s tactical value are built around a single operational requirement: fire and move before the enemy can respond. The system can fire eight rounds and relocate in under two minutes — 30 seconds to fire the first round, and another 30 seconds to displace after the last round leaves the tube. That two-minute fire-and-displace timeline is not an arbitrary performance target. It reflects the reality of counter-battery radar systems and drone-assisted targeting that have made stationary mortar positions increasingly difficult to survive in contested environments. A mortar crew that takes five minutes to emplace, fire a mission, and move is a mortar crew that gets targeted. One that completes the same sequence in under two minutes has fundamentally different survivability odds.

The non-seating baseplate design contributes directly to that speed. Conventional mortar baseplates embed into the ground with each round fired, gradually seating themselves under the recoil forces — which improves stability but makes rapid displacement progressively harder as a firing mission continues. A non-seating baseplate sacrifices some of that incremental stability improvement in exchange for the ability to emplace and displace quickly on almost any surface, including hard surfaces where a conventional baseplate cannot seat at all. For an urban environment, a rocky hillside, or a vehicle deck, that flexibility matters.

The platform integration reflects a deliberate design philosophy of vehicle agnosticism. The Scorpion Light system evaluated at Fort Magsaysay was integrated onto GM Defense Infantry Utility Vehicles (IUVs), a variant of the Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV), the Army’s current light mobility platform that has been fielding to infantry units since 2020. But the system’s modular design allows mounting on virtually any vehicle platform, and integrations have already been completed on the Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon and both the Polaris MRZR Alpha 4×4 and 6×6 configurations. That range of completed integrations — from the Army’s primary infantry squad vehicle to commercial off-road platforms used by special operations forces — gives the Scorpion a mobility ecosystem that spans conventional infantry, light forces, and special operations without requiring a dedicated carrier vehicle.

The air transport certifications extend that deployment flexibility into the vertical dimension. The Scorpion Light is certified as air-droppable and compatible with internal air transport aboard a CH-47 Chinook helicopter. For the 25th Infantry Division — a unit whose operational area spans the Pacific and whose expeditionary scenarios regularly involve island terrain accessible only by air — those certifications are not incidental. A mortar system that can be loaded into a Chinook, flown to a forward position, unloaded, and emplaced for a fire mission within the same operational sequence as the air assault itself compresses the timeline between landing and fires support in ways that conventional mortar employment cannot match.

The 81mm caliber places the Scorpion in the middle tier of the mortar family — heavier than the 60mm tubes carried by light infantry squads, lighter than the 120mm systems that provide the Army’s heaviest mortar fires. The 81mm has been the standard company-level indirect fire weapon for decades precisely because it balances range, lethality, and portability in a way that neither smaller nor larger calibers replicate. Mounting it on a vehicle-based autonomous engagement system preserves that caliber’s tactical utility while adding the mobility and speed of response that dismounted mortar employment cannot provide.