WASHINGTON — As US Army leaders work to meet the Oct.1 deadline to field small, one-way attack drones to every squad, they are evaluating ways to organize and train those units while also looking at what lingering red tape needs to be cut, according to one official central to the effort.
“We’re seeing that [if drones are] going to be a common capability and piece of equipment across every formation, every type, any group of soldiers, … we’ll probably have a little bit extra specialized training to be able to do this,” Col. Nick Ryan, the director of Army UAS Transformation with the Aviation Center of Excellence, told reporters last week.
Back in July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth inked the “Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance” memo aimed at ramping up drone production, fielding mass quantities of small, expendable drones — like first-person view (FPV) — and paring back restrictions that had given soldiers pause for flying them. That mandate included the goal of having every squad outfitted with the FPV-style weapons by the end of fiscal 2026. With just seven months left until that deadline, now the hard work to absorb those drones is underway.
The services have embarked on various initiatives to ramp up production and figure out what capabilities to buy, while also trying to nail down a glide path for fielding the aerial weapons and training operators to actually use them.
For Ryan and the Army, part of that equation meant hosting a drone warfighter competition this month where they spent time exploring which training and tactics changes will be needed.
“There’s gonna be so many mission sets that drones can do and various types of technology across ranges of autonomy,” Ryan told reporters.
“If we’re just going to have a cargo drone that’s flying boxes of MREs [meals, ready-to-eat] from point A to point B, back and forth, and not doing much else and it’s not a very risky mission … that doesn’t take a lot of skill and training,” he later added. “Whereas, if we have a FPV-style drone that is lethal and armed, and we expect that soldier to hit a very precise target at a very precise point … that soldier is going to need a much higher level of skill and training.”
The competition also served as an avenue for fleshing out battlefield logistics, like just how much additional equipment a squad or platoon can carry with them.
“What is too much equipment? How many batteries, How many drones? What types of controllers?” Ryan asked. “If we load them up with 20 killer drones, can they carry that many? Or is five about the max they can carry in their rucksack?”
But even if and when the Army nails down the formation, fielding, training and operations plans, will units want to fly them? Over the past year-and-a-half, Breaking Defense has written about soldiers’ hesitancy to fly small drones due, in part, due to what happened if they crash or are lost.
Since they had been listed as “nonexpendable property,” each drone had to be strictly accounted for and tracked; if a soldier lost a small drone, even in combat, it could trigger a time-consuming Financial Liability Investigation of Property Loss, or FLIPL. And, ultimately, their pay could be docked if they were found liable.
Service officials had been working on lifting some of that bureaucracy, a push that Hegseth’s drone memo sought to speed up, in part by removing the blanket “durable” term.
Now, Ryan says the small drone FLIPL problem should no longer be a concern for soldiers and their commanders. However, there are still property accountability questions the Army is sorting through during weekly drone dominance meetings.
“It’s less about the FLIPLs and worrying about the property,” he added. “How do we account for this volume and proliferation and number of drones that are going to be coming into the force?
“They’re getting ready to [be] here pretty soon, [and we’re] trying to just define what category of property they fall into,” Ryan said. “Are they going to be attritable? Are they going to be consumable, expendable, or durable?”
