The Army has decided to phase out a drone battalion that was set up to learn lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war, where both sides are at the forefront of autonomous military equipment and technology.
This unit, known as the Unmanned Assault Battalion, will “soon refocus on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne battalion assigned to a mobile brigade combat team,” an Army official told the Washington Examiner. The battalion is a part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
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The unit will still participate in a major exercise in Germany in August and September. It will then report its findings to the Army and start its pivot.
While this unit will be transitioning to a different focus, there are still several other ways in which U.S. troops are trying to learn from the war in Europe.
“I don’t think it’s completely prohibitive,” Cameron McMillan, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner. “This is one way to learn those lessons, but there are other ways too. Things like the National Training Center and the Joint Readiness Training Center, where Army units regularly rotate through, and there’s a lot of experimentation going on there.”
The decision comes as drones are revolutionizing warfare. Ukraine and Russia have been at the forefront of the drone evolution, though the U.S. has first-hand experience as well with the war against Iran. Russia and Iran have military cooperation with each other and have shared military technology that has been used against Ukrainian and American forces, respectively.
Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting chief of staff of the Army and the full-time vice chief, outlined his vision for the service in a memo to the force this week.
“U.S. Army forces must be prepared to overcome the most complex challenges our adversaries can impose and master an operational environment that looks fundamentally different from the battlefields of yesterday,” LaNeve said. “The next war will not look like our last. Yet there are timeless truths in war. The battlefield does not forgive weakness.”
Gen. Randy George, the former Army chief of staff, championed the normalization and proliferation of drones in the Army. War Secretary Pete Hegseth ousted George in April in a move that was controversial even among Republicans. Gen. James Mingus, the former Army vice chief of staff, retired a year earlier than expected prior to that, which allowed President Donald Trump to nominate LaNeve for the vacancy, who had been serving as a senior military assistant to Hegseth. Now LaNeve is the acting chief of staff of the Army.
Last year, George and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll introduced the Army Transformation Initiative. In a letter to the force, they wrote, “We will introduce long-range missiles and modernized UAS into formations, field the M1E3 tank, develop the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, and close the C-sUAS capability gap. Command and control nodes will integrate Artificial Intelligence to accelerate decision-making and preserve the initiative.”
George, in testimony before Congress last year, added, “Drones are going to be in every formation that we do. We’re going to have autonomous systems everywhere, in every formation, whether it’s to protect, detect, or attack. Those things are going to be in every formation, a logistics formation, and an artillery battery.”
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Driscoll has long applauded Ukraine’s drone ingenuity. Upon seeing how all the Ukrainians’ equipment operated seamlessly during a training exercise in Europe, the Army secretary came back stateside with a new mission in mind. He convinced defense contractors to jailbreak their equipment so it could operate with equipment from other companies.
In the Middle East, Iran’s drone capabilities have been on display during the conflict. An Iranian drone killed six U.S. service members in Kuwait during the opening hours of the war, while others were also used in successful attacks on U.S. bases and aircraft across the region.
