The inaugural battle kicked off Tuesday at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, bringing teams from across the active, Reserve, and National Guard components of the Army to test their skills and possibly win a slot on the service’s drone competition team.

“At the end of the day, it's not about receiving trophies or awards—it is about ‘what lessons can we take from this to find out who the best operator is and how they became the best operator? What skills and resources and training allowed them to become the best operator?’” Col. Nicholas Ryan, who leads the unmanned aerial systems team for the Aviation Transformation Integration Directorate at Fort Rucker, Alabama, told reporters. “And who's doing some amazing innovation out there across the Army…that we can then take and scale across the entire Army?”

The service is moving away from its previous drone operator model, which trained soldiers in its aviation branch to operate specific platforms. Instead, it’s likely that soldiers with additional training in operating UAS will be integrated into infantry, armor and other frontline units, where new doctrine will have them working alongside machine gunners, Abrams tanks, and howitzers.

“As we proliferate drones, and we're seeing where they best fit into the formation, what we're going through right now is deciding who are the right people to operate these, and what level of training do they need?” Ryan said. “And this competition really helps pull that out. For this competition, we didn't specify what type of soldier—what branch, [military occupational specialty] came here to do this—it was just: ‘Send your best UAS operators’.”

The three-day meet included two different lanes, plus a separate innovation competition where soldiers could submit white papers and custom drone builds, or demonstrate their piloting skills.

The first lane is a race through an obstacle course flying a first-person viewer drone. The second is a hunter-killer scenario, where soldiers camouflaged themselves with paint, dragged a weighted sled and did an overhead water-can press (events similar to the service’s physical-fitness test), then had a half-hour to identify and fire at five high-value targets. 

“The first drone is the hunter drone, their reconnaissance drone, and it's looking at an array of targets—about a company-size element of targets—and trying to decide which one out of those are the most important targets. And then the other drone operator is carrying the killer drones, the smaller one-way lethal drones, but they're not kinetically lethal in this case. And then they have to use those to hit those targets.”

Ryan said that while soldiers have been able to execute the movements and operate their drones properly, there have been communication breakdowns as they worked to get into position, identify targets, and fire on them.

“That's an example of something we didn't anticipate, but it's absolutely standing out as that is something we as an Army need to do better on,” he said. “If we're going to proliferate these drones and want them to be more effective and lethal, we just need to improve on how our soldiers talk to each other to communicate when they're using them.” 

Units were invited to bring their own small drones to the competition, with no strict rules about the brand, type or capabilities. That also meant they decided which and how much equipment to carry, something the Army is looking to standardize.

“When we're sending soldiers out to carry this equipment as part of a squad or a platoon, and they're carrying it in their rucksack, what is too much?” Ryan said. “How many batteries? How many drones? What types of controllers?”

Can they carry 20 killer drones, or does it make more sense to pack five? 

“So kind of developing a standard packing list for a drone operator is one thing out of this competition that we haven't defined or said yet, but we're definitely seeing a range of solutions from soldiers,” he said.

For next year’s competition, officials want to add more realistic scenarios, including the jamming threat that Ukrainian troops are seeing so often.

“We already talked about flying in a congested environment with electronic warfare and  building those into the lane,” Ryan said. “And so that's how we're thinking about this: what should we be pushing as a competition that are the highest-priority things our units should be training on to get really good at for their job in the Army?”