US Army drone school leaders said quickly changing battlefields mean the kind of companies the Army wants to work with are the ones making plug-and-play gear that’s easily upgraded.
The Army is training soldiers for rapidly changing drone warfare. Leaders say keeping pace — and gaining an edge — requires weapons and systems that can evolve just as quickly.
Maj. Wolf Amacker, who leads the Army’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Tactics Branch at the Aviation Center of Excellence, told Business Insider that when it comes to defense companies, “if whatever they’re building isn’t modular with other industry partners to work together, then I’m going to go with another industry partner that is.”
He said that he wants to work with companies that, for example, can build a single arming tool compatible with multiple drone types, instead of requiring a separate tool for each platform.
He said ideally the companies are “modular with how you can make that drop or that charge lethal through things that are already available and on hand.”
In practice, modularity means designing systems with interchangeable parts — hardware and software that can be swapped or upgraded without replacing the entire system. That modularity, Amacker said, gives soldiers more flexibility in what weapons they field and how they employ them.
He said he wants companies that prioritize modularity, are willing to think outside the box, and avoid being stovepiped — instead of taking the approach of, “This is my equipment, and if you want to use it, you just have to use what I give you.”
He wants to work with companies that ask, “Hey, how can we help you make your equipment even more useful and make those modifications with you?”
Maj. Rachel Martin, the director of the Army’s Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course, a drone course designed to improve soldiers’ lethal skills with small drones, agreed. She described drone warfare as a space where tactics and technology are shifting quickly.
She said that having industry working closely with the Army and making more adaptable gear is “something that is happening at a faster pace than ever before in the military,” particularly in the last two years.
Martin said that industry partners have “really risen to the challenge,” but made clear that companies that aren’t modular and adaptable will “fall off our programs of record” because “we’re not going to use something that doesn’t work for us.”
She said the best industry partners so far are ones that “actively listen to soldiers.” They observe training, absorb lessons, and adjust their systems to support what soldiers actually need “instead of saying: ‘Here, this is it, take it or leave it.'”
They engage in real time, overnighting fixes and make big updates in a matter of weeks, rather than months or years.
Martin said that if companies want soldiers to succeed, employ a system and “feel like it works for them,” then “having that interface and that real-time conversation as we train is critical.”
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has accelerated this shift, pushing many weapons makers to design systems that can be easily upgraded quickly based on soldier feedback and battlefield developments.
The tactics and technology in Ukraine are changing so rapidly that multiple arms, drone, and robot makers who have gear there previously told BI they’ve had to redesign their processes to keep up.
They are making weapons and combat system that can be updated far more easily by making them software-first and more modular, so only some parts need to be upgraded, or soldiers can swap parts themselves for different missions.
Ukrainian soldiers say they need flexible weapons systems that can be easily modified — even by troops at the front. Oleksandr Yabchanka, the head of robotic systems for Ukraine’s Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, previously told BI that the ground robots his unit uses function like Lego sets: They can be reconfigured for different missions, whether evacuating wounded soldiers or attacking Russian positions.
To stay relevant, unmanned-systems makers say they cannot rely solely on building entirely new platforms to upgrade capability. It takes too long to develop, manufacture, and deliver gear like that.
Gediminas Guoba, CEO of Lithuanian drone company Granta Autonomy, which has drones in Ukraine, told Business Insider that his company can’t just make systems that are simply ready for this year or the next; instead, they’re building easily updated and upgraded systems to stay relevant further into the future.
The software inside its systems “is changing every month” and can be pushed to systems in Ukraine. It’s very different from hardware changes made in factories and shipped to the battlefield.
Matt McCrann, CEO of the US arm of counter-drone technology company DroneShield, told BI that the drone and counter-drone fight has sped up so much around the world since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that development cycles have been reduced to weeks, instead of the previous months or years. And the company has put more emphasis on modular and adaptable designs to be able to iterate quickly, he said.
Patrick Shepherd, chief sales officer for Milrem Robotics, an Estonian company that makes autonomous ground robots that are used by Ukrainian soldiers, said the company deliberately does not design robots for single missions.
Instead, it makes them so soldiers can customize them based on what they want to do, like evacuation, explosive disposal, intelligence gathering, or weaponized roles. That approach allows for much faster adaptation than what “traditional, monolithic designs” permit.
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