That the U.S. Army needs to adapt to drone warfare is obvious. The best institutional mechanism to do that is not.
Since 2022, Ukraine has led the world in the integration of aerial drones into large-scale ground combat operations. Unfortunately, Russia has been a fast follower. Both armies are using drones within traditional infantry, tank, and artillery formations, while also creating new drone warfare organizations. That the U.S. Army needs to adapt to drone warfare is obvious. The best institutional mechanism to do that is not. But there are some in Congress who are ready to make the decision for the Army now.
U.S. House Resolution 8070, passed in June 2024, included a provision establishing a Drone Corps as a basic branch of the U.S. Army. Chief of Staff of the Army General Randy George expressed opposition, arguing drones should be integrated into existing formations, not consolidated in a separate branch. The provision was not included in the final version of the bill.
How to organize the Army for adaptation to drone warfare could be the most important decision Army senior leaders make in the next few years. There are two ways to get it wrong. One would be to treat drones as an entirely new arm, to be developed and employed independently. The other would be to treat drones as tools to help other arms do what they already do better. With the airplane and the tank—the most disruptive weapons that were maturing during this same decade in the last century—the Army got it wrong in both ways.
The U.S. Army purchased the world’s first military aircraft in 1909. By the 1920s, the Army had established aviation as a separate arm, which, with strong congressional support, grew increasingly independent. As a result, air capabilities developed quickly, according to entirely new warfighting concepts. But airpower became unmoored from land power, if not from reality. Army aviators came to view airplanes as war-winners in their own right. That vision was never realized, and poor air-ground integration plagued the Army throughout World War II.
With the tank, the Army went to the other extreme. After World War I, the Army restricted the development of tactics and technology for armored warfare to the purview of its infantry and, later, cavalry branches. Thus, infantry developed tanks for infantry purposes and cavalry developed tanks for cavalry purposes. No one developed tanks specifically for tank purposes because, in the Army’s infantry-cavalry-artillery paradigm, there was no such thing. But there would be.
How the Army organizes to adopt and integrate technology for drone warfare should accomplish three things. First, it should put capabilities into operational units quickly. Second, it should ensure drones remain integrated with other arms. At the same time, it should encourage innovations in tactics and technology that do not fit neatly within the purview of an existing branch or warfighting function. When the Army has done this well—and quickly—in the past, it was done through experimentation within fighting formations.
Changing faster than we used to
In December 2023, writing in Army Aviation magazine, General Jim Rainey and Dr. James Greer pointed out that in the first two years after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine drone warfare went through four generations of tactics and technology. Matching such a pace calls for speed that is not common within the Army’s traditional capability development process. Under normal conditions, it takes about two years from the time the Army decides to pursue a new capability to the time resources flow in support of it. This does not include the time to develop and staff options for that decision, which can be a multi-year process by itself. General George’s transformation in contact initiative, wherein operational units innovate and reorganize while they train and operate, is a more promising model. Units transforming in contact continuously experiment with new tactics, organizational structures, and equipment. What they learn informs decisions Army-wide.
For example, if a commercial-off-the-shelf drone helps solve a problem for one brigade, the Army could field a military-grade version to all brigades. Or it could make smaller buys, typically fielding the same system to just a handful of brigades at a time. That is how the U.S. Navy purchased manned aircraft in the interwar period, when that technology was evolving rapidly. In his book, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers, Andrew Krepinevich described that approach. Navy leadership recognized that an aircraft purchased for use across the entire Navy would become obsolete very quickly. So, instead, the Navy made smaller buys more often. This surely complicated training, maintenance, and logistics. But the strategy ensured the aircraft it fielded were always state of the art. It also lowered the stakes for individual purchase decisions at a time when budgets were tight.
Organizing the Army to adapt for drone warfare
To the extent that a Drone Corps would be an institutional sponsor for drone warfare, it is the right idea. But a new branch is, at best, premature. At worst, it risks the Army Air Corps pitfall: creating an agency that pursues its own agenda, apart from that of the wider, combined arms team.
Drone Corps is a people solution to a tactics and technology problem. To be sure, people will be part of the solution. But first the Army needs a better understanding of what those people will be doing. To develop that understanding, it needs more experience employing drones. Some of that will come by using drones within existing formations. But the Army will almost certainly also need at least some special-purpose formations. To see why, the trajectory of drone warfare capability development within the Ukrainian Armed Forces is instructive.
It is one thing to fly a drone…
Many of Ukraine’s drones are operated by soldiers who are not drone specialists. This constraint calls for simple drones with intuitive controls that soldiers of any specialty can learn to operate. Nevertheless, Ukraine has also needed special purpose drone units, not only because drones are complicated, but also because drone operations are complicated.
It is one thing to fly a drone. It is another to infiltrate by ground into a frontline area patrolled by enemy drones, launch undetected, navigate the contours of the enemy’s electromagnetic defenses, and then synchronize actions with other drones launched from separate locations to perform different functions. This level of complexity is akin to the difference between being able to drive a tank and being able to plan and execute combined arms maneuver with an armored formation. It requires a practiced team with a higher order of domain expertise.
Accordingly, Ukraine has increasingly fielded units specifically organized, trained, and equipped for drone warfare. Most are platoon- and company-size formations. But battalion and larger formations are proliferating. Ukraine has even created a new military service for drone warfare, though it seems unlikely to take direct control of the drone units that are already organic to their ground combat formations.
The U.S. Army need not race to put a drone warfare battle group in every division. But some level of experimentation with drone formations is advisable. The Army has done this well before. When Chief of Staff of the Army General George Marshall needed the Army to make up lost ground in learning about armored warfare, he created the Armored Force, under the control of an operational corps commander. The 11th Air Assault Division (Test)—the unit from the book We Were Soldiers Once… and Young—field-tested air mobility before deploying to Vietnam as the 1st Cavalry Division. More recently, multi-domain task forces have demonstrated how a forward-deployed unit can simultaneously operate, experiment, and transform.
Transformation in contact with provisional drone formations
The Army should not consolidate drone efforts into one organizational stovepipe. On the other hand, leaving it to the current functional communities to use drones as they see fit means developing capabilities in multiple stovepipes. It is all but inevitable that those communities—fires, maneuver, aviation, intelligence, sustainment, and others—will view drones primarily as tools to enable or extend what they do in their traditional roles. This inclination will make it harder for them to envision, let alone prioritize resourcing, entirely new ways of operating with the technology. To do that, the Army needs a deployable drone warfare formation, under the control of an operational division or corps.
Such a unit would be the modern drone warfare equivalent of the 11th Air Assault Division: an operational unit, designed around a new technology. But it should be smaller—the largest drone formations in the Ukrainian Armed Forces are battalions and regiments. Furthermore, as in Ukraine, where all ground units use drones, it need not have a monopoly on the technology. But a drone formation is necessary to generate expertise and advance the art. This echoes how armies learned to fully exploit the potential of the machine gun.
A good argument against a large drone unit is that drones are a tool, like a machine gun. In most armies units have machine guns—machine guns do not have units. But this was not always the case, as John Ellis explains in his book, The Social History of the Machine Gun. European armies entered World War I not appreciating the complexity and impact of employing machine guns at scale. The British Army had used machineguns in colonial wars around the world. But a year into the war they still had not fully worked out how to employ them against a military peer. Finally, they created the Machine Gun Corps, which improved tactics, generated expertise, and managed machine gun battalions. In the years that followed, that knowledge was inculcated across the force. Once it was no longer needed, in the early 1920s, the Machine Gun Corps disbanded.
Today, the British Army is taking a more proactively formation-based approach to transformation. In 2022, to develop the concept of deep reconnaissance-strike, it created the 1st Deep Recce Strike Brigade. To learn how to use robotics in the close fight, the British have an infantry battalion operating as a robotics-enabled battle group. But neither formation is primarily focused on exploiting the potential of drones.
Conclusion
Drones have not revolutionized land warfare, and they seem unlikely to displace traditional arms. Take it from the commander of Ukraine’s new drone warfare service. In a July 2024 interview with The Economist, he said that drone warfare represents, “the most decisive change in military organization since the creation of air forces in the beginning of the 20th century…. [but] military operations still depend on combined arms, and other kinds of troops will continue to be just as important.”
Nevertheless, drones add something to combined arms that meaningfully changes the game. Whether the Army overreacts, underreacts, or gets adaptation for drone warfare just right will depend largely on how it organizes for capability development. Transformation in contact with provisional drone formations would field capability quickly, keep drones integrated with other arms, and allow the Army to aggressively experiment at the intersection of multiple functions. The Army would regret not starting until months into a protracted conflict. We should start now.
Neil Hollenbeck is an Army War College fellow with the Clements Center for National Security. He previously commanded a combined arms battalion in the 1st Cavalry Division, directed the commanders action group at Army Futures Command, and served on faculty at West Point.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.
Photo Description: U.S. Soldiers assigned to Delta Company, 317th Brigade Engineer Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division perform operator qualifications for the Medium Range Reconnaissance systems (MRR) near Mihail Kogalniceanu Airbase (MKAB), Romania on Nov. 25, 2024.
Photo Credit: U.S. Army Photo by Sgt Kourtney Nunnery
