As unmanned surface vessels carved through the waters off Key West, Florida, and autonomous aerial systems scanned the horizon for illicit trafficking targets, a quieter but equally critical mission was unfolding behind the scenes at U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. Fourth Fleet’s Fleet Experimentation (FLEX) 2026 exercise. Inside a network of command trailers operating advanced unmanned systems, researchers from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (ERDC-CERL) and industry partner LEMA were proving that the future of expeditionary operations depends not only on autonomous platforms and artificial intelligence, but also on resilient, unmanned energy systems capable of providing uninterrupted power in austere environments.