- The US Army is closely watching drone warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East.
- What it's learning is that drones are becoming deadlier, and the technology is evolving fast.
- A top Army officer outlined some of the ways the US is readying for future fights.
As the US Army closely watches the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, military planners are gathering critical intelligence about drones and how they're being used in combat.
Among the lessons being learned are that drones are fast becoming much deadlier and that US soldiers need to be ready to defend themselves from the evolving threat, an Army officer told Business Insider. And what the world is seeing unfold in conflicts now might be just the beginning.
"We're seeing the technology advance faster," said Col. Glenn Henke, commandant and chief of the Army's Air Defense Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. But it's not just the technology that's advancing; it's how the tech is being employed in combat.
The Ukraine war ushered in a new era of drone warfare that has been unprecedented in scope and scale. Uncrewed systems are used for reconnaissance and strike missions on the ground, in the air, and at sea, and both Kyiv and Moscow are constantly trying to innovate with their technology to stay one step ahead of the enemy.
In the sprawling conflicts in the Middle East, drones have been employed by a number of actors, including the US, Israel, Iran, and Tehran-backed groups across the region, from Lebanon down to Yemen. In the Red Sea, American warships have squared off against attack drones in a sustained first-of-its-kind fight.
"I think we're kind of at the front end of this. So, the evolution of the capability is happening very quickly," Henke said. "The evolution of how it's being employed is happening very quickly. I don't think any of us believe that we've seen the plateauing of what is in the realm of the possible."
"We still think it's sort of ahead of us," he said. "The platforms are becoming much more capable, much more lethal." The defenses that work one day may not be as effective the next.
Henke oversees the Army's Joint C-sUAS (Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft System) University, or JCU, where American servicemembers learn to identify, engage, and defeat hostile drones. It is just one element of the military's broad response to the rising threat of uncrewed systems.
While US troops have not faced the kind of large-scale drone warfare seen in Ukraine, they have gotten a taste of the action. Since October 2023, Iran-backed groups have launched scores of drone attacks against American bases and assets in the Middle East.
The US military has, for the most part, defeated these attacks, but there have been losses. In January 2024, a drone managed to slip past the defenses at Tower 22, a small military outpost in Jordan. It struck the facility, killing three soldiers and wounding dozens more. The deadly attack highlighted the threat these systems pose and the need for greater readiness.
Late last year, the Pentagon unveiled a new counter-drone strategy to meet the challenges presented by its adversaries, who are rapidly developing drone capabilities. "These cheap systems are increasingly changing the battlefield, threatening US installations, and wounding or killing our troops," then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the time.
When it comes to drone defense, Henke said, "one of the enduring lessons that we've seen in many cases is focusing on the command and control aspects of this and bringing in all of this into the single C2."
He explained that the Army is very focused on its next-generation C2 initiative, "which would streamline some of the command and control software that we use" and "allow us to bring everything onto sort of a single pane of glass."
Henke said that the Army is also focused on distributing counter-drone equipment at different levels.
At the division level, for instance, this includes the Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System, or LIDS. This system comes in fixed and mobile variants and is designed to defend against higher-end drone threats, as opposed to the smaller, quadcopter-style systems running rampant in Ukraine.
There's also an effort to proliferate capabilities down to individual soldiers, squads, and platoons, too. Last year, BI observed US soldiers training with the mobile Smart Shooter and Dronebuster devices, which use kinetic (physical strike) and non-kinetic (electronic warfare) methods to defeat small drones, respectively.
The challenge, though, is that "it's not reasonable for me to figure out what I'm going to buy three years from now, knowing how quickly this technology is moving," Henke said, emphasizing the idea of "flexible funding" to ensure the Army can pivot to procure new capabilities as the drone threat evolves.
