U.S. learns (v. slowly) from Ukraine drone experience

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the U.S. Army to prepare for the kind of drone warfare the Ukrainian military is waging as it defends against the invading Russians—by eliminating middleweight armored vehicles, and adding 1,000 drones to each of the Army’s divisions.

There are 18 divisions in the American Army.  So in theory, there are 18,000 unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in the Pentagon’s new plan for the Army. 

That might seem like a lot. But these drones represent just one day of drone expenditures by Ukraine’s roughly 100 ground combat brigades and their supporting UAS teams. 

It may take a crisis to compel the Army to truly embrace small drones, and deploy them on the necessary scale and with all the support they require, said Kerry Chávez, an assistant professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

“Short of a tectonic cultural shift,” she said, “it would take war.”

“Specifically, war that will lead to massive attrition in expensive weapon systems and demand from the ground for cheap solutions,” added Ori Swed, a professor and drone expert at Texas Tech University. “That’s what changed the Ukrainian army’s DNA.” 

Hegseth rolled out his drone plan around the same time the Pentagon and Army took a hatchet to some long-running weapons programs. 

On the cutting board — subject to Congressional approval — is the Army’s MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone, the ground combat branch’s version of the 1,100-pound Predator surveillance and attack drone, built by General Atomics in California. 

The fighting in Ukraine and Yemen has proved that slow, easy-to-detect medium drones such as the Predator and its larger cousin, the 3,900-pound Reaper, are highly vulnerable. 

Russian missiles have practically eliminated Ukraine’s 3,200-pound Bayraktar TB-1 drones. Houthi militants in Yemen have downed several U.S. Air Force Reapers in recent weeks. A drone in the class of the TB-1 and MQ-9 can cost millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars—making each loss sting.

“Ukraine is existentially threatened in a total land war. The U.S. is not, so has the luxury to implement a staged rollout of this capability,” said Chavez.

Imitating Ukrainian Innovation Processes

The Ukrainians adapted quickly to the new realities of warfare, replacing their small numbers of TB-1s and other pricey, reusable medium drones with thousands of cheaper, explosives-laden one-way attack drones—most weighing a few hundreds pounds and costing tens of thousands of dollars—as well as literally millions of tiny, inexpensive surveillance and attack drones that might weigh a few pounds and cost $500.

Ukrainian workshops now produce more than 2 million drones a year.

Two overarching concepts form the foundation of Ukrainian technological innovation. 

First is the ability to field new technologies quickly, driven by innovation and the ability to experiment in the field. The second is to rapidly scale winning solutions.

This has caught the eye of the DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit. 

The Ukraine war has shown the need to “get a lot of different tools into the hands of warfighters as fast as possible,” said David Michelson, the director of the DIU's autonomy portfolio, at XPONENTIAL, a drone technology conference held in Houston. “[W]hen we get a software update from a company… [we should be able to] validate that immediately, get that out into the battlefield and deploy it. We're not there yet, but we're working on it.”

The U.S. also needs to develop processes to quickly test new solutions to frontline problems.

This would revolve around “modeling and simulation, independent verification and validation of models so that we can do that rapidly at the speed of relevance – within a day, two days,

three days… as opposed to maybe a nine to twelve month process,” Michelson said.

The president of Shield AI, a California-based defense tech company, said that its testing in Ukraine showed the need for its drones to rapidly adjust to battlefield realities. 

At XPONENTIAL, he described his company pushing a software update to its drones when it became clear that Russian GPS-denial electronic warfare was hampering their drone's ability to operate.

“[The drone operators] called up our team, they're like, ‘WTF, airplane went the wrong way,’ and 24 hours later the team had pushed a software update. They re-planned the operation, and 48 hours later conducted it, used no GPS at any point in the mission,” said Ryan Tseng. “It culminated in a HIMARs strike hitting a strategic asset. But the point is that the software lifecycle took 48 hours from problem to solution.”

Out: Heavy Armored Vehicles; In: Small Drones

The war in Ukraine has also shown how vulnerable large, slow-moving armored vehicles can be to drone strikes. 

So while the Army will accelerate development of a new version of the M-1 Abrams tank, the current version of which weighs more than 70 tons, it will abandon the new M-10 Booker (a 45-ton light tank) as well as two types of armored truck—the 11-ton Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and the two-ton Humvee.

The Army hasn’t specified what kinds of UAS it will acquire under Hegseth’s new plan. But the service nodded toward the Ukrainian experience. 

“The Army has incorporated lessons learned from the Ukrainian conflict which inform how we approach procuring additional tactical unmanned aerial systems,” Maj. Matt Visser, an Army spokesperson, told The Counteroffensive.

That implies that small, cheap drones are coming to American units, albeit in modest quantities at first. 

“1,000 drones is not a lot,” said Samuel Bendett, an analyst with CNA in Virginia. 

The Army seems to appreciate that—and expects to acquire more in the future – Visser said that this figure is just “a good starting point.” 

Who Will The U.S. Army Tap For These Drones?

The acquisition of just 18,000 small drones isn’t an enormous opportunity for the big Western defense firms—and Chávez for one expects them to sit out any competitions that flow from the Army’s UAS plan.

“The big hitters in the defense industrial base like General Atomics likely won’t take these contracts,” she said. Given their much greater overhead compared to startups, and thus their need for bigger margins on any given contract, the larger firms often focus on the more lucrative contracts. 

But for smaller startups, the Army’s drone transformation could be huge. 

The Army may have hinted at what vendors it prefers when, back in September, it tapped California-based Anduril Industries and Performance Drone Works in Alabama to build a small number of small surveillance drones for infantry companies. 

That deal is worth just $15 million. The divisional acquisition could be much bigger but still involve smaller companies such as Anduril and PDW. 

PDW co-founder and CEO Ryan Gury said his company is ready to meet demand for small drones—and lots of them. In December, PDW signed a contract to supply its C100 quadcopter to the Army. The approximately $1,000 C100 can carry a 15-pound payload, including weapons, for as long as 74 minutes.

“We factor cost into every stage of the innovation, engineering and deployment process,” he said. “We’re exponentially scaling up our production with new facilities and larger domestic manufacturing capabilities. We have engineers and pilots testing and iterating constantly, learning from the ever-changing tactics we see shared online daily.”

U.S. Lagging Behind In Key Concepts

The Army needs to do more than just pump money into the industrial base if it hopes to even modestly grow the service’s arsenal of tiny UAS. Drones are only as useful as the systems that support them: foremost, the radios, networks, mission planners and controllers. 

The Ukrainians learned that the hard way; after 39 months of wider war, the electromagnetic spectrum over Ukraine “is a mess,” said Glenn Carlson, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and, until recently, the president of the electronic warfare industry's Association of Old Crows. “Everyone’s trying to talk and everyone’s trying jam.” 

Deploying thousands of small drones every day requires careful coordination and organizational agility on the part of literally hundreds of Ukrainian units. 

It’s not clear the Americans appreciate the intensity and scale of the problem. 

“The primary obstacle to equipping each U.S. Army division with 1,000 drones is not manufacturing capacity or even budget—it’s the lack of an integrated, modern infrastructure to support, coordinate and command them at scale,” said Mike Fraietta, a drone pilot and co-founder of Gargoyle Systems, a New York autonomy company.

“What the Army currently envisions is akin to deploying fleets of high-performance vehicles onto unpaved roads,” Fraietta added. “This is not a hardware problem—it’s a systems architecture failure.”

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