Participants from across the military will converge on Camp Atterbury in Indiana next month for a “Top Gun” school for first-person kamikaze drones—the type that right now are helping Ukrainians defend against invading Russian forces.
Since 2023, the semi-annual Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX event has served as a showcase for new drone prototypes and other emerging weapons technologies that are useful across the services. This year’s will also display human skill in one of the fastest growing areas of warfare: flying first-person viewer, or FPV drones. The demonstrations will simulate combat conditions in urban environments and elsewhere. It’s all part of the newest Pentagon push to attain what military leaders are calling “American drone dominance.”
The Defense Department Office of Research and Engineering, working with the Army and the Indiana National Guard, helps put on T-REX. But Alexander Lovett, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for prototyping and experimentation, said it is relevant to the Navy, Air Force, and Marines as well.
“The services are now standing up FPV drone schools and drone capabilities,” Lovett said at a Pentagon event Wednesday, put on by the Research and Engineering Office. The Top Gun school portion will feature teams and drone pilots facing off against one another, “red versus blue,” and new counter-drone tech, he said.
Cheap consumer drones in warfare aren’t new. Russians and Ukrainians used them during Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, to collect reconnaissance data to enable artillery strikes on the ground. Before long, militant groups like ISIS were using them to drop grenades on opposing forces.
But in late 2023, as Ukraine’s defense ministry stepped up its production and delivery of first-person kamikaze drones and pushed out wide-scale training to Ukrainian forces, the unmanned aircraft quickly went from a battlefield curiosity to a determinant of tactical victories, accounting for 70 percent of Russia’s battlefield loses, RUSI estimated in February.
The Pentagon has taken notice. In 2023, it launched a pilot effort to quickly scale up the production of low-cost, highly autonomous attack drones with a program dubbed Replicator. While the project was hailed for its vision, it didn’t achieve the scale of output that many hoped for.
But last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a slate of policy changes to enable military entities within the services and combatant commands to do their own purchasing, rather than go through slower and more formal channels.
Wednesday, Hegseth told reporters: “When it comes to drones, large, small, all classes, we need to be world class, and we will.”
He highlighted the memo as a means to “open the aperture for other companies and other systems to be rapidly tested and fielded by units also pushing decisions down to lower level leaders.”
Emil Michael, the newly-confirmed undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, pointing to the various drone models and prototypes in the Pentagon courtyard, described the display as “the beginning of American drone dominance.”
At this point, dominance is an aspiration. Russia has supplied its frontline troops with nearly 1.5 million small drones, CNA analyst Sam Bendett told The Guardian in January. Thursday, he told Defense One the number is likely larger this year than last, but Ukraine may now be ahead, supplying its own forces with 200,000 drones a month. A larger problem is China, which dominates the market not only for small consumer drones but also the essential digital and electric components that go into them.
Michael, in his remarks to reporters, pointed to other administration efforts to re-balance that. “The percentage of components that are made in America will only increase,” he said, though he did not say how quickly.
But Russian and Chinese forces can train drone operators in settings where jamming measures are active. Michael said drone makers wishing to sell to the Pentagon learn “the lessons from conflicts that are happening around the world…That’s sort of endemic to becoming a drone manufacturer in the [United States.]”
Still, actually learning how to make drones work in heavily degraded communications environments means testing in settings very different from the United States. Michael seemed unfazed by those obstacles.
“If you’re a smart builder, we’ve opened the door for you to come to our test ranges. And we’ve opened the door for rapid acquisition, and you could build to those specifications… That could be done easily here by people who haven’t done that over there.”
Experts disagree with that assessment.
Last month, Brandon Tseng, a co-founder of Shield AI, a drone company working with the United States military as well as Ukrainians, told Defense One: “There might be two or three electronic warfare environments in a year as part of some major exercises in the USA. It’s something that the USA needs to increase the number of their challenges in doing it.”
Outside of that, the FAA and FCC place barriers on jamming and electronic warfare testing across almost all of the United States, because jamming interferes with cell phones and other critical communications equipment. Drone and counter-drone tech developers have long-said that’s a big hindrance to their efforts.
In response to a different question at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Lovett essentially concurred with Tseng: “We have limited places where we can do that, which are usually government ranges that then drives availability, and it’s just a factor of life.” He highlighted recent efforts to work the FCC and the FAA to adjust rules and guidelines to allow for more testing and test ranges. But the process of finding safe ways to jam drones in the United States will not be quick.
For Tseng, the secret to American drone “dominance” is working in a combat environment like Ukraine, where actual dominance is on the line every day. “if you are not operating in Ukraine, then your stuff is not serious. That’s how the European military leadership sees it. We know a lot of companies went into Ukraine. They’re no longer there anymore, right? This electronic warfare environment was so harsh.”
Bendett told Defense One: “We will never be able to truly replicate [Chinese company] DJI success, but we have to shake loose our own creativity and the ability to tap into a massive amount of efforts currently working in tactical drone developments.”
Allowing military units to pick their own drones, rather than wait for the Pentagon to make a decision, is a key part of that.
And learning the lessons of Ukraine from actual Ukrainians is another likely key element to drone dominance, one of the organizers for the upcoming T-REX event told Defense One on background. To that end, members of the Ukrainian military will be be on hand to observe the experimentation. And the feedback will likely be blunt.
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