At a recent exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, a US Army company commander used attack drones and ground robots to destroy enemy positions, clearing the way for soldiers.
The drones and robots did the difficult and dangerous work that a rifle company might otherwise have had to do, showing the role Army uncrewed systems could play in future wars.
The uncrewed systems assault occurred during a 3rd Mobile Brigade Combat Team exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center in April. Col. Ryan Bell, the brigade commander, told reporters he assigned the task to one of his company commanders.
“I want you to make this breach uncontested for your riflemen when they enter,” Bell recalled telling the commander.
Breaching is a very dangerous battlefield mission that requires soldiers to move slowly through obstacles such as mines, wire, trenches, barriers, walls, and anti-vehicle ditches. Enemy forces may have already trained machine guns, artillery, or mortars on the most predictable pathways. If troops get pinned down by obstacles or jammed in a killbox, it can quickly become deadly.
The company commander turned to drones and robotics to clear the breach. Bell, who shared the experience during a media roundtable on Thursday, said that the unit responsible for executing the breach mission launched 25 attack drones that soldiers had assembled themselves, targeting bunkers, machine gun nests, and triple-strand concertina wire.
Other drones targeted electronic warfare sensors and jammers. And even more uncrewed aerial systems dropped smoke canisters, obscuring the battlefield. Then, remaining obstacles like land mines and wire obstacles were destroyed by two uncrewed ground vehicles packed with C4 explosives.
“When the riflemen got there, the breach was uncontested,” Bell said. “Every target had been struck.”
“And you didn’t have an engineer or a Sapper squad running out with a grappling hook trying to low-crawl with a Bangalore torpedo,” the commander said. “It took us 35 drones and a little over 100 pounds of C4, but under the cost of three 155mm artillery barrages.”
The drill highlighted the value of a “drone contact layer,” which engages the enemy before human soldiers do, helping prevent losses.
“When my riflemen get there, the enemy is already down, and they are finishing the fight, but it’s an unfair fight,” the colonel said. Drones and ground robots are increasingly recognized as useful tools that can enable soldiers and keep them safer.
The breach mission was just one part of the brigade’s larger experimentation with drones. Soldiers there have been assembling their own cheap, attritable systems with parts off the US’ Blue UAS [Uncrewed Aerial Systems] List and their own 3D printed pieces.
Bell said that the brigade learned several lessons from the event, including the need for significant numbers of cheap drones that are easy for soldiers to quickly use in combat conditions.
At the exercise, Bell said that the brigade is also working with artificial intelligence. The 3rd Mobile Brigade has been implementing AI into its planning, including staff building their own agents. Bell referenced one case where an AI bot processed 25,000 battlefield reports to provide a clearer picture of the environment.
While AI was useful in some ways, there were other situations where the technology wasn’t helpful. “Large language models don’t really understand three-dimensional space, so they’re not good for developing courses of action,” Bell said. “That’s where you need the expertise of a skilled staff to understand the art of fighting to plan the operation.”
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