US Army officials say the service has amassed enough small drones to spread them across its formations. Now the challenge is training soldiers to use them.
“We fielded 10,000 drones” after the first phase of the Drone Dominance program, Col. Gregory Merkl, the director of drone dominance for the Army, said on Thursday during a media roundtable.
“We’re in the process of receiving another 30,000 drones currently,” he shared. “That is enough absolutely to get them down to every squad level.”
“Where we still have some work to do, candidly, is getting everybody trained at the appropriate level,” he said. “Right now, if you look across the force, you have that capability in every platoon. We still have a little bit of work to do in terms of getting qualified pilots down to the squad level.”
The Army plans to field thousands of low-cost, one-way attack drones by next fiscal year and has held a series of events to select drone companies for advancement in evaluations called Gauntlets.
Last year, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo directing the overhaul of how the Pentagon buys and integrates small uncrewed aerial systems across the armed forces. That line of effort led to Drone Dominance, an iterative development program investing $1 billion to purchase at least 200,000 drones through 2027.
As drones become more common in soldier arsenals, the Army is learning how best to train troops on using the systems.
The Army’s efforts to train drone operators include specialized courses like the Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course and other programs focused on flying specific models of drones. The service is also exposing soldiers to drones starting in basic training. This approach gets troops familiar with the technology and then transitions them to tactics in different scenarios.
One approach launched last year was a three-week crash course at Fort Rucker, Alabama. The pilot class was described as a “catch-up” to close the US gap on drones, bringing students from different assignments in to learn the basics of piloting the systems while also exploring how to build and 3D print parts for them.
Observations from Army drone courses and schools have highlighted skills some soldiers already bring to drone warfare, from flying drones as a hobby and playing video games to the engineering know-how needed to build and modify them.
One important aspect of the Army’s efforts to catch soldiers up on using drones is in how it approaches integrating drone warfare lessons across the service. Army officials have said soldier feedback on these systems is prioritized, as are takeaways from the war in Ukraine and US soldiers who have trained with Ukrainians.
Last month, news broke that the Army was phasing out the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s specialized drone unit, raising questions about how the Army intends to not only learn drone lessons, but also disseminate them across the force.
Army officials say the unit’s experimental drone role was always temporary. They said the plan was for formation across the Army to cultivate drone skills rather than depending heavily on a specialized unit.
“There was always a plan for us to provide lessons, to put them into really realistic, tough, difficult training scenarios, and then provide feedback so that the institutional Army could make decisions about doctrine and organization and acquisitions — which we’re doing right now,” said Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, acting commander of US Army Europe and Africa.
“We got a tremendous amount of data and feedback from the rotation that we’re providing to the Army,” he said.
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