Half the drones in a recent US Army combat exercise were designed to be expendable

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…