US Army leadership told Business Insider it wants to be flying a lot more uncrewed aircraft than crewed ones in the coming years. We are talking about a tremendous increase in the number of drones.
Its ambitions, which align with goals outlined by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent directive, come from a vision for what Army officials and the Trump administration have described as a more lethal force ready for future warfare.
In an interview with Business Insider, US Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll and Gen. James Rainey, the commanding general of Army Futures Command, said that unprecedented changes in warfare are fueling plans to overhaul what the Army flies.
“We believe there’s a role for some manned aircraft,” Rainey explained, “Big picture-wise, right now, about 90% of the things we’re flying have humans in them and 10% don’t. And I believe over the next several years, we would like to invert that.”
The plans to give every division 1,000 drones within the next two years, he added, speak to the “aggressiveness” with which the Army is going after the new uncrewed objectives.
Earlier this year, Hegseth sent out a memo on strategic transformations within the Army, laying out goals and timelines for the service, including force restructuring and cuts to certain programs and systems that altogether represent one of the largest Army revamps since the end of the Cold War. The push is estimated to cost around $36 billion over the next five years.
In the memo, Hegseth indicated that crewed attack helicopter formations would be reduced, restructured, and augmented with drone swarms capable of overwhelming adversaries.
War-winning Army capabilities and the ones that aren’t
Driscoll said this big change, along with others identified in the DoD memo, is already underway and largely focused on examining what systems no longer make sense in the context of the Army’s vision for its future and what systems will replace them.
He mentioned the AH-64D Apache attack helicopter as one platform that no longer aligns with plans for the transformation of the force. “The flying costs on that were $10,000 an hour,” the secretary said of the older Deltas, pointing out that the figure is about twice the cost of the newer Echo variant of the aircraft.
“Those are the kinds of decisions that I think we had let linger and fester for too long as an Army for all sorts of reasons,” Driscoll said. “What we are trying to do is take a hard look at these things,” he explained, and decide whether they align with what the warfighter needs.
Last month, Lt. Gen. Joseph Ryan, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, plans, and training, said that the Deltas are no longer “a war-winning capability that we can fight with and win today.” Even the more advanced Echos, he said, are “on the cusp of being capabilities where we don’t necessarily see them contributing to the fight the way they have done perhaps in the past.”
The Army plans to shelve the Delta variant and further examine other crewed aircraft that may no longer be sufficiently effective. It is also reviewing other helicopter models and plans to reduce the number of helos operated.
The future of war is robotic
More broadly, uncrewed aircraft are being seen as alternatives that soldiers can send forward on the battlefield to do missions that crewed aircraft have traditionally done.
There’s still a place for crewed aircraft in the Army. Some helicopters, for example, still boast value for landing troops behind or around enemy positions to surprise and surround them. But future operations are expected to be a whole lot more robotic, with an Army aviation portfolio that more heavily relies on unmanned systems integrated with manned ones.
The Army sees itself at a turning point. Senior defense officials appointed by President Donald Trump have called out what they see as excessive spending, outdated systems and weapons, and a need to expedite changes to be prepared to deter or fight a future conflict. It’s part of efforts to maximize readiness, increase lethality, and get soldiers what they need most.
Such aims aren’t entirely new, though, and execution will be key. During the previous administration, for instance, the Army was already discussing the need for more uncrewed systems and changes to its aircraft fleet, especially with the cancellation of the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program.
Last year, Rainey told lawmakers that for scouting and recon missions “the right thing to do is to use unmanned systems and not put humans in harm’s way.”
A major motivator for many of the ongoing transformation efforts is China, which the Pentagon has referred to as a pacing challenge. Officials and lawmakers in Washington see China’s meteoric military growth and modernization and are pursuing capabilities that will allow the US military to deter aggression and, if necessary, overcome that rapidly evolving fighting force in armed combat.
Drones, from pocket-sized aircraft to quadcopters to bigger warfighting assets, are a key part of these efforts, providing a range of combat capabilities en masse for a relatively low cost compared to some other US weapons programs.
The Pentagon has been working to expedite the development and deployment of uncrewed aerial systems across the services, recognizing their value as this technology sprints onto the scene in big ways. Army soldiers have been testing different types of reconnaissance and strike drones are being tested in areas like the Indo-Pacific region, learning how to adapt unmanned systems to the challenges of different missions and environments.
That’s a key aspect of an ongoing “transformation in contact” initiative, which focuses on Army units being given free rein to use different capabilities during training and exercises to see how the systems might work best.
The value of drones, particularly the smaller systems, has been especially visible in the war in Ukraine, which Army leaders continue to study. Ukrainian operators fly drones for intelligence-gathering and strike missions, among others.
Due to extensive electronic warfare countermeasures on the battlefield, both sides are heavily relying on fiber-optic drones to maintain a stable connection between the operator and system while also exploring new technology, like AI-enabled drones that can resist jamming. The US is not in a similar situation, but it is looking to innovate as if it were.
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