Starting next year, the Marine Corps wants to see each Marine base building its own competitive attack drone teams. Leaders say competition will be key to building skills in the absence of combat.
“We can’t replicate the existential threat that they feel in places like Ukraine, which forces the cycle of iteration and learning,” Lt. Gen. Benjamin Watson, head of the Corps’ Training and Education Command, told reporters Wednesday at the Modern Day Marine expo in Washington DC. “The closest thing we can do is put ourselves out there in competition.”
“We think that puts us under a level of pressure that will help us to iterate faster, particularly in the first-person-view drone space, which is one of the places we’ve got the most room to grow,” Watson continued.
More funding, held up in continuing resolution turmoil, could also help move things along.
Small, inexpensive FPV drones have come to dominate Ukrainian battlefields, functioning as readily available reconnaissance platforms and cheap precision-strike ammunition, contributing heavily to battlefield casualties.
Such warfare is unlike anything US troops have previously experienced. It’s not something that can be easily replicated, but it is what leaders say they want the military training for, spurring the Marine Corps’ plan for competition-driven training.
Under such a plan, Marine bases would create their own teams mimicking the services’ newly established Attack Drone Team, based out of the Marine headquarters base in Quantico, Va.
Watson described the Corps’ Attack Drone Team as the “leading edge” of what the service hopes to replicate across the force, including more focus on counter-UAS training and the authority for developing policies for the rest of the force.
The general compared the new goal to the Corps’ marksmanship team in which Marines from across the Corps compete for top spots on the namesake team from their bases.
“The premise has been every Marine a rifleman, and we will still hold true to that ethos, with the idea being that every Marine can be lethal at out to 500 yards,” Watson said of the Corps’ intense devotion to ensuring each Marine, regardless of speciality, is competent shooting a target from half a kilometer.
The idea behind building these new competitive drone teams is that small arms fire is still necessary but now insufficient for contemporary conflict, he added. “Now that same individual Marine, using a different weapon system, can also be lethal out to 15 or 20 kilometers with a first-person-view drone.”
Marine leaders consistently highlighted drone adoption and training as a critical need at the Modern Day Marine symposium, with small group discussions and panels comprised of combat arms, logistics, and aviation Marines trying to work through the headaches of getting drones to junior Marines quickly, in whatever way possible.
Until the service can formalize these plans, units will likely be expected to get troops trained using any scrappy, unconventional method possible.
As the DoD tries to adopt a more rapid procurement process, whatever tech various base drone team Marines use will inevitably be behind the power curve, Watson said, given the lightning pace at which this tech is evolving. But the service has got to make something coherent happen to get Marines using drones, he said. Soon, service-wide competitions will be an answer.
“We’ve got to field a system and get it in the hands of Marines so that we can start learning and confronting some of these problems that we’re going to face head-on,” he said.
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