The US Army brought thousands of drones to a recent combat exercise, and roughly half were designed to be expendable. Soldiers could use and lose the drones in the fight, treating them like ammunition.
The Army’s shift toward using low-cost drones has relied on amassing enough systems to make them expendable. It’s getting tens of thousands of drones to soldiers through the Drone Dominance Program, the goal being that soldiers use these systems without worrying about quickly coming up empty.
At the recent Saber Junction exercise in Germany, Army soldiers used approximately 1,900 autonomous systems.
“Those numbers continue to increase every rotation, and we will continue to increase them in future rotations,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, acting commander of US Army Europe and Africa, told reporters at a roundtable on Thursday, which Business Insider received a transcript of.
Of those roughly 2,000 drones used during the exercise, “1,000 were consumable,” Brig. Gen. Terry Tillis, head of the 7th Army Training Command, said, adding that soldiers were using them “like a munition.”
“They’re fired, and then it’s employing them in a matter to achieve effects on the battlefield,” he said.
At the Saber Junction exercise, US soldiers used drones in different combat scenarios, some informed by the war in Ukraine, against electronic warfare and counter-drone systems. Army officials said replicating more challenging environments was important for giving soldiers realistic experiences.
Using a bunch of drones was similarly important, as “those drones are now a part of our basics of being able to survive and integrate into protection plans, using them to sense further and strike faster,” Norrie said.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown that while drones do not always replace more exquisite strike capabilities, they can offer soldiers a low-cost and effective method for hitting enemy targets. Not worrying about losing the drones to jamming or enemy fire — and having a large enough stockpile to resupply quickly — gives troops a fairly consistent weapon to rely on.
Last year, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo directing an overhaul of how the Pentagon purchases small uncrewed aerial systems across the armed forces. The resulting program, Drone Dominance, is investing $1 billion to purchase at least 200,000 drones through 2027.
That memo also characterized how the military should be thinking small drones.
“Small UAS resemble munitions more than high-end airplanes. They should be cheap,rapidly replaceable, and categorized as consumable,” the defense secretary wrote.
Tens of thousands of drones have been bought from different companies as part of the Drone Dominance effort. “We’re in the process of receiving another 30,000 drones currently,” Col. Gregory Merkl, the director of drone dominance for the Army, said. “That is enough absolutely to get them down to every squad level.”
Soldiers have also been working on building and 3D printing parts for their own drones so that they can quickly craft systems when they need them or customize them for specific missions.
Earlier this year, a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division, for instance, assembled roughly 150 of the 228 attack drones they used in an exercise, with each system taking a couple of hours for a soldier to build.
Speaking about that exercise, Col. Ryan Bell, the commander of the 3rd Mobile Brigade, said, “If a company has only one or two drones, or a platoon has a single drone, it’s a niche capability,” Bell said, referring to one-way attack drones. “But a company that is provided 20 drones a day has an entirely new form of combat power.”
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