Western militaries are building training around an expectation of drone crashes and losses while also trying to avoid wasting them. It’s a balance as it experiments with the new way of war surging in Ukraine.
Maj. Rachel Martin, director of the US Army’s new drone lethality course, told Business Insider that the Army must be “willing to accept that some of these systems will get attrited in training is normal.”
“If a drone crashes in training, it happens, let’s learn from it, and then let’s move forward,” she said. “None of your soldiers need to be browbeaten over it.”
That is why militaries use drones in the first place, she said. Uncrewed systems are not irreplaceable human beings, and they aren’t, in the majority of cases, high-dollar pieces of equipment. When they crash or break, it’s not a huge financial blow.
There has to be “a little bit of empathy when it comes to crashing a drone.” Martin, who previously commanded a Gray Eagle drone company, said that “drones crash. I’ll say that to the day I die, having owned drones as a commander, drones crash.”
Soldiers “need time and resourcing to get trained on this stuff. You should not expect a soldier to just pick this up for the first time within five hours,” Martin said. “You need to make gated planning strategies that provide them time and space to get comfortable with the system.”
Simulator technology helps avoid wasting these assets, officials explained.
“Yes, FPVs are cheap,” Maj. Wolf Amacker, who leads the US Army’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Tactics Branch at the Aviation Center of Excellence, told Business Insider, referring to small first-person-view drones.
However, “you don’t want to have someone get on it for the first time and absolutely smash it and wreck it and lose $2,000 when you can take a $20 video game and get someone really good after 20 to 30 hours, or good enough to where they can then safely and effectively fly that aircraft.”
Budgets aren’t infinite, but the Pentagon is increasingly viewing drones as expendable ammo rather than precious weaponry, so there is much less risk-aversion when training to use them.
Those realizations have critical relevance in combat. Reports from early on in the drone war in Ukraine indicated that its forces were losing 10,000 drones a month. Prolific electronic warfare, malfunctions, and kinetic strikes all threaten drone operations and make losses and crashes the norm.
Amacker said that in Ukraine, out of the thousands of drones launched every day, only about 30% reach their targets, and then many of those that do don’t have a significant impact.
Accepting drone losses is being baked into drone warfare training and doctrine.
Lt. Col. Ben Irwin-Clark, commanding officer of the UK’s 1st Battalion Irish Guards, an elite infantry regiment, told Business Insider that as his battalion receives more drones, “we are deliberately crashing them into nets and crashing them into targets” in training. The unit repairs them afterward, “so it doesn’t really matter if we break them,” he said.
He shared that they wrapped them in bubble wrap early on and avoided flying them. The result was that the training wasn’t realistic because they weren’t treating the drones as disposable.
Putting them to work on a new drone obstacle course, breaking them as just “kind of part of the training,” and repairing them in the “drone hub” has created more opportunities for the unit to learn about drone warfare.
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