DRONESIs the U.S. Army Backing Off on Drones?
Former Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll, Generals Randy George, Christopher Donahue, and David Hodne, the Army leaders who drove the transformation of the Army and championed the broad adoption of drones, are gone: Driscol resigned after Secretary Hegseth dismissed George and Hodne and forced Donahue to retire. Gen. George was replaced by General Christopher LaNeve, who called for returning the Army to the “fundamentals of Soldiering.” These developments raise questions about the Army’s commitment to scaling drone adoption, and about whether the Army, which had started embracing a central role in a world of precise mass, may change course.
A series of developments over the past month has raised questions over how serious the U.S. Army is about integrating lessons on the changing character of warfare, and how it plans to fight in the future.
First, there were reports last month that U.S. military units fared poorly against Ukrainian drone units in an exercise in Germany earlier this year. This was followed by news that the Army will phase out a specialized drone unit created less than a year ago to improve the service’s drone capabilities. Finally, last month saw the resignation of U.S. Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll, the Army’s most prominent remaining champion of transforming the service for an age of precise mass—meaning that relatively cheap, highly accurate, uncrewed systems are deployed at scale.
If the Army is going to continue evolving to meet new threats as they emerge, it will need to keep accelerating not just the acquisition of drones, but their integration into units around the world. Adoption, more than the acquisition of technology, is the difference between winning and losing in war.
Combined Resolve and Lessons from Ukraine
One of the most important ways militaries decide how to position themselves for future conflicts is by learning lessons from ongoing conflicts. In April and May, roughly 3,500 U.S. soldiers drawn largely from the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, participated in Combined Resolve, the U.S. Army’s semi-annual exercise at its training center in Hohenfels, Germany. Waiting for them was a Ukrainian-reinforced formation. According to the Wall Street Journal, Ukrainian operators excelled against their U.S. counterparts.
The results of the exercise were unsurprising—Ukrainian drone units have spent four-and-a-half years refining drone reconnaissance and strike operations and building tacit knowledge that U.S.-based training cannot replicate, a point underscored by NATO’s top military commander, Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich. U.S. soldiers, whatever equipment they may have at their disposal, have never faced an adversary flying and dropping ordnance as persistently as was the case in Combined Resolve.
That such exercises are happening at all is arguably evidence that the Army’s leadership is trying to learn lessons from the war in Ukraine and that it knows there is work to do. That is a good thing. What matters most now is how the Army, and the U.S. military in general, responds. After all, there is always a temptation to dismiss these exercises as one-offs, for example, by arguing that the lessons of
