Participants from across the military will converge on Camp Atterbury in Indiana next month for a \u201cTop Gun\u201d school for first-person kamikaze drones\u2014the type that right now are helping Ukrainians defend against invading Russian forces.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Since 2023, the semi-annual Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX<\/a> event has served as a showcase for new drone prototypes and other emerging weapons technologies that are useful across the services. This year\u2019s will also display human skill in one of the fastest growing areas of warfare: flying first-person viewer, or FPV drones. The\u00a0 demonstrations will simulate combat conditions in urban environments and elsewhere.\u00a0 It\u2019s all part of the newest Pentagon push to attain what military leaders are calling \u201cAmerican drone dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n The Defense Department Office of Research and Engineering, working with the Army and the Indiana National Guard, helps put on T-REX. But Alexander\u00a0Lovett, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for prototyping and experimentation, said\u00a0it is relevant to the Navy, Air Force, and Marines as well.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe services are now standing up FPV drone schools and drone capabilities,\u201d Lovett said at a Pentagon event Wednesday, put on by the Research and Engineering Office. The Top Gun school portion will feature teams and drone pilots facing off against one another, \u201cred versus blue,\u201d and new counter-drone tech, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cheap consumer drones in warfare aren\u2019t new. Russians and Ukrainians used them<\/a> during\u00a0 Russia\u2019s initial invasion in 2014,\u00a0 to collect reconnaissance data to enable artillery strikes on the ground.\u00a0Before long<\/a>, militant groups like ISIS were using them to drop grenades on opposing forces.<\/p>\n But in late 2023, as Ukraine\u2019s defense ministry stepped up its production and delivery of first-person kamikaze drones and pushed out<\/a> wide-scale training to Ukrainian forces, the unmanned aircraft quickly went from a battlefield curiosity to a determinant of tactical victories, accounting for 70 percent of Russia\u2019s battlefield loses, RUSI estimated<\/a> in February.<\/p>\n The Pentagon has taken notice. In 2023, it launched<\/a> a pilot effort to quickly scale up the production of low-cost, highly autonomous attack drones with a program dubbed Replicator. While the project was hailed for its vision, it didn\u2019t achieve the scale of output that many hoped for.\u00a0<\/p>\n But last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a slate of policy changes<\/a> to enable military entities within the services and combatant commands to do their own purchasing, rather than go through slower and more formal channels.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wednesday, Hegseth told reporters:\u00a0\u201cWhen it comes to drones, large, small, all classes, we need to be world class, and we will.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He highlighted the memo as a means to \u201copen the aperture for other companies and other systems to be rapidly tested and fielded by units also pushing decisions down to lower level leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n Emil Michael, the newly-confirmed undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, pointing to the various drone models and prototypes in the Pentagon courtyard, described the display as \u201cthe beginning of American drone dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n At this point, dominance is an aspiration. Russia has supplied its frontline troops with nearly 1.5 million small drones, CNA analyst Sam Bendett told<\/a> The Guardian in January. Thursday, he told Defense One the number is likely larger this year than last, but Ukraine may now be ahead, supplying its own forces with 200,000 drones a month. A larger problem is China, which dominates the market not only for small consumer drones but also the essential digital and electric components that go into them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Michael, in his remarks to reporters, pointed to other administration efforts to re-balance that. \u201cThe percentage of components that are made in America will only increase,\u201d he said, though he did not say how quickly.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Russian and Chinese forces can train drone operators in settings where jamming measures are active. Michael said drone makers wishing to sell to the Pentagon learn \u201cthe lessons from conflicts that are happening around the world\u2026That’s sort of endemic to becoming a drone manufacturer in the [United States.]\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, actually learning how to make drones work in heavily degraded communications environments means testing in settings very different from the United States. Michael seemed unfazed by those obstacles.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf you’re a smart builder, we\u2019ve opened the door for you to come to our test ranges. And we’ve opened the door for rapid acquisition, and you could build to those specifications\u2026 That could be done easily here by people who haven’t done that over there.\u201d<\/p>\n Experts disagree with that assessment.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last month, Brandon\u00a0Tseng, a co-founder of Shield AI, a drone company working with the United States military as well as Ukrainians, told Defense One:\u00a0 \u201cThere might be two or three electronic warfare environments in a year as part of some major exercises in the USA. It’s something that the USA needs to increase the number of their challenges in doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n Outside of that, the FAA and FCC place barriers on jamming and electronic warfare testing across almost all of the United States, because jamming interferes with cell phones and other critical communications equipment. Drone and counter-drone tech developers have long-said that\u2019s a big hindrance to their efforts<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n