US soldiers need drones they can easily grab like ammo and fly under fire, Army commander says

• US soldiers need a lot of cheap drones that are easy to use and access in combat, a US Army commander said.
• He said the drones needed to be treated like ammunition rather than a niche capability.
• Soldiers also need to be able to quickly learn how to fly drones, reducing the cognitive load.

Soldiers need numerous drones readily available that they can grab and launch like ammunition, a US Army commander said.

Drones become far less useful when soldiers have only a handful to work with. The war in Ukraine has shown that mass matters. More drones can give a unit more combat power and more ways to hit enemy positions without relying as heavily on artillery or expensive precision weapons.

Speaking to reporters this week about his unit's use of uncrewed systems, Col. Ryan Bell, the commander for the 3rd Mobile Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said the need for a large number of drones was clear.

"If a company has only one or two drones, or a platoon has a single drone, it's a niche capability," Bell said, referring to one-way attack drones. "But a company that is provided 20 drones a day has an entirely new form of combat power."

Based on the 3rd Mobile Brigade's experience at a recent Joint Readiness Training Center wargame at Fort Polk, Louisiana, Bell said the math on drone need and usage suggested a brigade would need between 1,000 and 1,500 a week in a sustained combat operation. "We need drones at scale. We need to treat them like ammunition," he added.

The brigade brought a variety of drones to the exercise, including cheap 3D printed ones. The systems were used for gathering intelligence on enemy positions and striking targets. When soldiers went into combat drills, they brought dozens of systems with them.

The commander said that there were three main takeaways from the recent exercise: mass, cost, and usability. First, soldiers need a lot of drones. Second, "if they are extremely expensive, they won't use them," he said, explaining that company commanders would likely be overly concerned about losing them. Third, Bell said, "we've got to make sure it's designed for combat utility."

The system, he said, needs to be usable by, say, "a 19-year-old private who is trying to fly a drone and has been awake 48 hours."

Reducing the cognitive load on troops in the field, specifically making it relatively easy for them to pick up an uncrewed system and immediately know how to use it, is a priority for the Army and other services. Military officials have identified a common user interface or controller, as well as autonomous features that enable easier targeting or flight path planning, as potential solutions.

Bell said that at the exercise, the 3rd Mobile Brigade used a terminal guidance capability that helps a first-person-view drone lock onto a target so the soldier doesn't have to pilot the system all the way to impact. "That significantly reduces the training requirement for the operator," he added.

Another capability under development is "one-to-many" swarm control, which would let a single operator manage multiple drones at once. That could help units put more drones into the fight while reducing the burden on individual operators.

Both terminal guidance and swarm control have appeared on Ukraine's battlefields and use some degree of artificial intelligence or autonomy to help with targeting, flight, or both.

With the need for more drones, Bell said that there are multiple demand signals for the defense industry, including in high-capacity batteries and smaller hybrid generators. "As we field more technology, power generation becomes increasingly problematic," he said, adding that there is also a max capacity to what soldiers can carry that makes better batteries a priority.