CAMP ATTERBURY, Indiana–The Pentagon has been talking about rapidly scaling up drone forces for years—efforts that so far have produced interesting new prototypes and lively demonstrations. But while the services conduct experiments using small numbers of drones, there has not been a clear sense of how the United States would conduct sustained drone warfare, or how closely it would resemble what is happening today in Ukraine. 

However, a combination of recent developments, tech breakthroughs, and policy changes suggests that could soon change. And the picture that has emerged is that future U.S. drone warfare will look like Ukraine—if Ukraine had had a cheat code before the Russian invasion.

The Technology Readiness Experimentation event, or T-REX, here this month brought together drone makers, AI, data, and communications software companies to show off not just how well new autonomous drones can hit targets, but also next steps for mass, coordinated drone warfare—the sort being used on the front lines of Ukraine, but at a far greater scale. 

Under a muggy Indiana sky, Emil Michael, the newly confirmed undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, along with military officers, other officials, and a small contingent of media watched as a pickup truck carrying a refrigerator-sized box drove out to the middle of a field. One by one, a half dozen drones hatched from a “hive” and levitated into position. Inside, screens showed the target, as well as the location of various other elements, network connectivity, and more. 

Michael and the others then saw drones move from their positions to take out the target: an armored vehicle some distance away. 

As demonstrations of new military weapons go, it lacked the drama of a large-scale coordinated live fire. But the demonstration’s most important elements were invisible: a web of new sensing, communication, and autonomy technologies working together under tight time constraints to show a new path forward for drone warfare—one with all the elements Ukrainians say they wish they had more of from the beginning. That includes better communications, actual doctrine, and a robust manufacturing base.

The path is inspired and informed by the rapid innovation on Ukrainian battlefields, with front-line troops and a growing menagerie of drone makers working side by side—often under combat conditions—to reconfigure and sometimes even invent new weapons. 

“What’s happening in Ukraine is, the whole world’s watching, right? It’s a new modality for warfare, and that means that you can keep humans behind and use machines or robots,” Michael said. “What you have to do, if you’re doing that, is rapid innovation, and what we’re all learning from that is that innovation matters. Every two, three weeks, you see something new coming out of Ukraine. You see the use of fiber-optic cables to prevent jamming. You see different defense methods. We’re taking all that in so that we can dominate in the next year.”

What sets the new U.S. military approach apart from Ukraine is a sense of urgency within the Pentagon that the United States must install the required elements to enable more effective and coordinated drone operations now, rather than try to improvise them in the midst of war, as the Ukrainians were forced to do.

Those elements include digital command and control that can stand up to aggressive electromagnetic warfare efforts; more effective autonomy distributed across drones and sensors; training doctrine, techniques, and procedures for front-line drone warfare so operators don’t have to teach themselves; a larger selection of drones from companies with experience updating or changing designs or software to meet rapidly changing needs from front-line operators; and an industrial base that can quickly produce and push out far greater numbers of drones.

Digital command and control and autonomy

One key way the United States is building on the Ukrainian model is by focusing on training with command-and-control capabilities that can support drone operations, even in contested environments. Due to constant Russian electronic interference efforts, Ukraine drone operations use minimal command and control. 

While some software companies, such as Palantir, have been on the ground in Ukraine since the start of the 2022 expanded invasion, the broader Ukrainian telecommunications environment has been under relentless attack. Ukrainian commanders routinely highlight the need for more robust communications equipment.

The T-REX experiment included a digital backbone from AWS, partnering with GDIT. Tony Jacobs, an engineer from AWS’s Defense Department team, said the experiment enabled 26 different vendors to test not only their own equipment but also participate in larger missions and operations. 

“There’s 26 different companies having data rounded in and fanned out. Some of them are low [technology readiness level], so we’re helping them understand how a mission is executed. Not just how do I do my job, but how do I do my job and integrate it with a larger system?” Jacobs said. He said the team created multiple data channels so video feeds from drones and other sensors, as well as command orders, could all be merged, or could operate separately and even pull from or send data to larger cloud resources.

Militaries in heavily electronically-contested environments don’t typically have access to large cloud data resources. Brandon Bean from GDIT said their intelligent routing software, DOGMA, allowed “nodes at the edge”—drones with sensors moving through a heavily jammed area—to connect with larger communication nodes even under conditions he described as “dirty internet,” or “any internet that you can’t control the infrastructure on. So what this does is allows you to set conditions for how you ingress and egress through a network.” 

The DOGMA system uses secure vector routing and software-defined networking to essentially take that data coming off the battlefield to an AWS cloud securely, even through the commercial internet.

Drones will also increasingly rely on autonomy to make decisions without having to communicate with commanders. And that autonomous decision-making will be guided not just by the cameras and other sensors on the drone itself but by others, via what one military official described in the briefing as “a full autonomous kill chain,” which the Marines employed during the experiment. A passive sensor network provides any individual drone with the intelligence needed to detect—and discriminate—targets, allowing a single ground or air robot to determine if, say, a flying object is an enemy drone or bird, based on where it came from, how it’s behaving, and other factors.

The military official stressed that autonomous targeting and firing is “not protocol right now. But we know eventually we’re going to have to get there.” 

U.S. drones flying against those of an adversary will also need a variety of means to take out their targets, including other jamming techniques, microwave or directed energy, missiles, or other kinetic effects.

Training, testing, scaled-up manufacturing

Last month, the Pentagon issued a memo to boost U.S. drone production, pushing more purchasing power to lower-level commanders. But that leaves critical questions that need answers before wide-scale drone deployment, namely: What training will operators have? What concepts of operation will they employ to figure out what equipment to buy? And where will they test out products?

Another obstacle to wide-scale deployment of drones has been a lack of tactics, techniques, and procedures for drone warfare. That, too, is changing. Col. Scott Cuomo, who commands the Marine Corps’ Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico, said the Marine Corps, working with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment amd the 5th Special Forces Group, as well as Navy SEALs, is close to an announcement on a joint, overarching doctrine for drone warfare.

So where will forces with that new doctrine test equipment? Michael said he’s focused on opening real-world testing to a wider number of companies with less red tape through events like T-REX. More than 100 different companies were present at the event, including some “walk-ons.” He promised additional training ranges and other opportunities for smaller tech companies to test their wares, and an additional memo to come out soon. 

“The point is that we have enough so that commercial industry can test at enough frequency, so that we get the innovation loops… test, try, prototype, revisit, build again, and so on,” Michael said.

The hope now is that those new elements—doctrine, more testing, digital infrastructure—will give drone makers the confidence to invest not only in prototypes but also in manufacturing capabilities.

“Mass production is a big part of this,” he said, citing the drone memo and other steps  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken to lay the groundwork for a robust U.S. drone industry. 

But that new manufacturing base won’t look like today’s factory lines, where manufacturers produce large volumes of units and then issue periodic modifications. Rather, he said, the challenge now is for drone makers to produce drones that are highly customized for specific needs but on a scale much larger than previous efforts to mass-produce cheap, highly effective drones. That only happens through more teaming events where drone makers can “learn how to optimize [the drone designs], get feedback [from the operators], and continue iterating,” he said.

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