The U.S. Army soldier steered the drone deep into enemy territory where it spotted about two dozen enemy vehicles hiding beneath a canopy of trees.
Col. Joshua Glonek recalled the jolt of excitement that ran through his staff at the drone’s discovery, followed by hushed chatter in the small, dark tent where his team was preparing for what came next.
His 3,500-soldier brigade was in the last hours of an 11-day training center battle against a similarly sized force. Such exercises — the closest thing the Army has these days to actual combat — happen many times a year.
But this one was different.
The rapid proliferation of deadly drones in places like Ukraine had set off a growing sense of alarm among the Army’s top leaders.
Senior Army officials were relying on Colonel Glonek and his troops to catch up to America’s adversaries. It was their job to figure out which drones the Army should buy and how it should fight with them.
In the months leading up to the training center battle, conducted this winter at a U.S. Army base in Germany, Colonel Glonek’s brigade received about 150 drones like those dominating the war in Ukraine. The Army also provided his unit with dozens of loitering munitions — essentially armed drones — capable of hovering over the battlefield for as long as 45 minutes before they swoop in for the kill.
The opposition force, which is based at the training center and knows the terrain, received 50 drones.
The new weapons gave Colonel Glonek a view of the 60-square-mile battlefield that, until recently, he had never thought possible. He also knew the enemy could see him and his troops.
It took his artillery battalion about 10 minutes to aim all of its cannons at the enemy vehicles hiding in the woods. A volley of about 144 simulated artillery rounds quickly followed, enough to destroy most of them. The dozen or so soldiers in Colonel Glonek’s headquarters let out a small cheer and began high-fiving each other.
When the fight was finished, Colonel Glonek’s brigade had killed three times as many enemy fighters as a typical unit, according to senior Army officials.
A few months later Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, was touting the brigade’s success to Congress. The training exercise demonstrated that the Army’s formations were “capable of rapidly improving their lethality,” he told lawmakers.
This was one way of framing the story, but there was another, more troubling one that General George did not share.
It was the story of a new kind of warfare that was growing deadlier by the day.
Until recently, defense experts had expected that new unmanned technology would allow U.S. troops to detect and kill the enemy from a distance, shortening wars and making them less risky.
In places like Ukraine, the opposite was proving to be true.
One Ukrainian Army officer recently tried to explain to an American officer in Washington what it felt like to fight on a battlefield swarming with drones.
“Everything wants to destroy you,” Lt. Col. Volodymyr Dutko told his U.S. counterpart for a study published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
This was the future of war. The big question for Colonel Glonek and General George was whether the U.S. Army, burdened by peacetime rules, politics and bureaucracy, could keep up.
Out With the Old
To pay for this new Army, General George needed to cut. That meant eliminating weapons that he and other senior leaders believed would not be able to survive drone attacks.
He cut the M-10 Booker, a light tank that was designed to fight through enemy machine-gun fire, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. The Army had spent more than $1 billion to develop it but decided this year that it could be too easily destroyed by a $500 or $1,000 kamikaze drone.
General George also cut short the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, a 7-ton armored troop carrier built to survive a blast from a buried roadside bomb, the biggest killer of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The vehicle made less sense in a war in which the primary threat was flying drones. The Army had planned to buy as many as 50,000 but is now stopping at 18,000.
The Army plans to spend some of the savings on new systems, like the Infantry Squad Vehicle, a dune-buggy-like troop carrier that consists of nine seats, an engine and some roll bars. Instead of armor, it relies on its speed and its ability to move off-road and under tree cover to evade attack.
Some former Army officials criticized General George’s plans, in interviews with The New York Times, as too reliant on unproven technology. Drones were important, they said, but also fallible. Bad weather or electronic warfare systems could ground them for hours or days at a time.
The speedy, light Infantry Squad Vehicle might perform well in training center battles, they maintained, but would be too vulnerable to old threats, like buried bombs, artillery and tanks. “We’re building formations that we know are fragile,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, who helped develop the Army’s modernization plans a decade ago and who is now retired. “That’s a really risky bet that gets paid in blood.”
Some in Congress warned that General George’s cuts were creating gaps that would weaken the Army. The Army’s 2026 budget proposed eliminating the Gray Eagle, a long-range drone that was fielded in the early 2010s and required a runway secured by more than 100 soldiers. Today’s drones could be flown by two soldiers, General George testified.
Lawmakers told General George that they wanted a long-term plan that conformed to the Pentagon’s normal acquisition process, built to deliver groundbreaking weapons systems over a period of five or 10 years.
“We need to see your homework,” Representative Mike D. Rogers, Republican of Alabama and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, chided this summer.
General George didn’t have that kind of plan. Such an approach, he believed, was too rigid and slow. Today, drones are everywhere. Some of the most groundbreaking manufacturers are developing drones for business rather than war.
Many of the most innovative companies are not even American. In Ukraine, drone manufacturers and engineers are working alongside operators in the fight, tweaking software and hardware in response to the latest enemy countermeasures.
This is the model General George wanted to emulate.
Last year he decided to start equipping three of the Army’s 32 brigades with the latest drones, loitering munitions and electronic warfare systems. His goal, he said in an interview, was to “short circuit” the Pentagon’s cumbersome bureaucracy and give a handful of “flexible, adaptive” commanders, like Colonel Glonek, the ability to figure out what their soldiers needed to win on the modern battlefield.
General George dubbed the new units “transformation in contact” brigades and pressed them to experiment even as they trained for war.
One of them, from the 101st Airborne Division, sent an officer to an artificial intelligence conference in San Francisco where he met the leaders of a small tech company that was using A.I. to visually identify objects.
The unit loaded the company’s software onto a drone and, before one of its combat training center battles, flew it over the opposition force’s vehicles in its motor pool. Later, during the fight, the A.I.-enabled drone was able to identify a camouflaged enemy vehicle after spotting just one corner of its exposed bumper.
“These aren’t futuristic capabilities,” said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, who commanded the 101st Airborne Division. “These exist today.”
The new experimental units also searched for new ways to hide on a battlefield teeming with sensors.
Today every Army command post gives off an invisible electronic signature that enemies can target. One of the brigades bought 250 cheap computer boards and programmed them to give off signals resembling emitters in their headquarters.
The goal was to flood the zone with false signals and then disappear in the clutter.
“You constantly have to be hard to kill,” said Col. James Stultz, who commanded the first experimental brigade.
A Machine Devoted to Killing
Colonel Glonek’s brigade, from the 10th Mountain Division, was starting a nine-month deployment late last year along NATO’s eastern flank when it was selected by General George.
Senior Army leaders wanted to see if their model for transforming the Army could work when troops were deployed. They also wanted to see how the new equipment — especially the drones — performed in the cold, fog and snow of northern Europe.
Colonel Glonek had spoken with the soldiers from the 101st who had purchased the cheap computer boards and decided to take their ruse a step further. He contracted with a Czech company to make three inflatable artillery canons, similar to those the Ukrainians were using in their war with Russia. Then he paired the decoys with electronic emitters.
During their training center battle in February, Colonel Glonek’s troops baited the opposition force into firing at the fakes, exposing their location. In each of the three instances, Colonel Glonek’s troops immediately fired back, destroying the enemy cannons.
His boldest innovation was building three new formations — dubbed “Strike” companies — that he armed with medium-ranged drones, loitering munitions and mortars.
The new 80-soldier companies quickly became Colonel Glonek’s most efficient killers. About 90 percent of the brigade’s fire missions began with a drone finding the enemy and then monitoring the kill.
“We had more targets than we had assets to shoot them, just because the drones were so much more capable,” Colonel Glonek said.
The new units’ most pressing problem was exhaustion. A handful of officers in the Strike companies were managing a torrent of information pouring in from the drones. A small number of sergeants, meanwhile, focused on the security of the two-person teams flying the aircraft, which were high-value targets.
And then there were the drones’ batteries, which struggled to hold a charge when temperatures plunged. The sergeants used the exhaust from their vehicles to warm the batteries.
“Priority one was to use the drones,” said Sgt. Benjamin Simma, 24. “Priority two was to recharge the batteries so we could keep using the drones.”
Staff Sgt. Dakota Ireland, 29, recalled going four days with almost no sleep. “I was actively hallucinating,” he said. He imagined that enemy fighters were attacking his vehicle, only to wake up and realize there was no one there.
“I don’t think the reality of what drones mean on the battlefield has really sunk in for the U.S. Army,” said Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, a former commander in Afghanistan who is retired. “We certainly haven’t encountered the psychological impact of having a machine looking at you all the time that’s devoted to killing you.”
“It’s a game changer,” he added.
After 11 days in the cold, Colonel Glonek’s soldiers took control of a mock village that was their final objective. They then conducted a live-fire exercise with their loitering munitions. Their targets were mothballed tanks.
For many soldiers, it was their first time operating drones armed with real explosives. With a tap on a video screen, they could maneuver the kamikaze bomb to strike at the tank’s weakest point, where the turret meets the body.
“You see exactly what the missile is seeing,” recalled Lt. Marcus Sanger, 24.
He thought about what it would be like to watch the enemy die that way. “I could see it being traumatizing,” he said. And he tried not to imagine what it would feel like to have one those weapons hunting him.
‘You Ain’t Gonna Find Us’
On a hot August morning, a few dozen Strike company soldiers headed out to the range at Fort Polk, La., where they are based, to practice flying the Ghost-X drone.
The aircraft looks like a dragonfly, and has a range of about seven miles. It lifted off from a patch of dirt and disappeared into the sky. The drone operators’ task was to find some reconnaissance scouts who were hiding in a pine forest.
In the cold of Germany, the drone’s thermal camera could easily spot warm human bodies, even when they were hiding under tree cover and camouflage. But on an August morning when the temperature was 95 degrees and rising, everything on the drone’s thermal camera glowed white hot.
The scouts, who had covered their hide sites in camouflage netting, began taunting the drone operators.
“Let me know if my snipers need to take a shot,” the scout platoon leader texted. “You guys are well within range.”
“You ain’t gonna find us all,” another scout texted First Lt. Lauren Little, the drone platoon’s leader.
The soldiers flying the drones were all infantry troops, selected for the special duty. Lieutenant Little, 23, was chosen after a successful stint leading a regular infantry platoon.
She was kneeling next to a private first class who was learning to fly the drone. Sweat dripped from their faces onto a laptop keyboard. She and the platoon sergeant suggested different flight paths. They analyzed the dips in the terrain and directed the operators to areas of the woods where the scouts might be hiding.
The platoon had been flying for a little more than an hour when Lieutenant Little spotted a couple of white dots on the screen.
“Those little specks look like someone’s body parts sticking out,” she said.
Eventually, her team found three of the four scout positions, though the hot weather had made the task far tougher than some in the platoon had expected. “I am surprised this has gone on so long,” said Staff Sgt. Steven Davidsmeyer, 35. “I’m a little disappointed.”
The company commander arrived to check on his troops.
“Three out four isn’t bad,” said Capt. Thomas Roberts, 29. “Obviously, I want four of four. But if they had found everyone, then I would wonder what my scouts were doing.”
On battlefields, like Ukraine, soldiers received instant feedback on which weapons and tactics were working the best. The results were measured in dead bodies and terrain taken or lost.
At Fort Polk, Colonel Glonek and his troops were still learning how to gauge success.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Times.
The post The Army’s Race to Catch Up in a World of Deadly Drones appeared first on New York Times.
