The ironclad warship, the machine gun, aircraft and aircraft carriers, radars, and nuclear weapons all forced military leaders to adapt or face painful losses on the battlefield. The latest evolution of this old tale is the explosion of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) onto the 21st century battlefield. Drones are a permanent feature of war, and the U.S. Army has taken note.
This week, the Army released a plan to reshape itself into something a bit more relevant to a new battlefield that is saturated with unmanned systems. The big winner appears to be air-defense artillery, a military profession that specializes in knocking things out of the sky. New air-defense battalions and batteries were announced, with Special Forces absorbing some big cuts to pay for the effort. The announcement comes after we lost three soldiers in Jordan to a suicide drone launched by an Iranian backed militia. It also gives the public a sneak peek at the Army’s annual budget request to Congress, which should be released in the coming weeks.
America has been demanding of our air-defense soldiers, a military profession that waned after the SCUD missile attacks of the Gulf War and the Army swelled into a light-infantry counterinsurgency force during the George W. Bush presidency. But the need has returned. Drones were a core element in the success of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Iranian proxies have since racked up 150 attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East, almost all from deadly UAS systems. Russia is churning out tens of thousands a month to feed their war machine in Ukraine. Artificial intelligence tools are linking them together into deadly swarms and the systems themselves are cheaper and easier to build than the rockets we use to knock them down.
While it is well and good that the Army will train more soldiers to knock bad things out of the air, the service still suffers from an acquisition problem. There are new forms of electromagnetic and directed-energy wizardry that can zap not just drones, but drone swarms, out of the sky at the cost of pennies-per-engagement. The weapon is energy, not expensive rocketry, so the batteries are endless. American innovation is wonderful at finding technologic solutions to problems, in particular military problems. But American bureaucracy, the Pentagon bureaucracy worst of all, is wonderful at ensuring those technologic solutions never see the light of day.
It is not for lack of trying. Dozens of new organizations have stood up to help the military “go fast.” That is, buy things fast and get them in the field fast. If only we could field new military systems as fast as we field new Pentagon offices. This is the fundamental problem with Pentagon acquisition: Caution is prioritized and risk is sacrilege. But risk aversion is a risk unto itself. And the result on the battlefield is dead soldiers, as we saw in Jordan.
Representative Michael Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret who has led the charge to reform broken Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, expressed his irritation at a recent House Armed Services Committee hearing: “A frustration the committee’s aired very publicly is why the Pentagon has been so slow to acquire counter-drone technology if you’re suffering nearly 200 attacks in the last three years.” In a bipartisan display of righteousness, Representative Adam Smith of Washington echoed that same sentiment, saying that counter-drone technologies, and in particular directed-energy technologies, “need to go from promising to deployed quickly.”
No one wants American soldiers looking like the French at Agincourt, with British longbows raining arrows down on their heads. The Army just took an important step forward. But the acquisition problem still looms large. It will be curious to see if they can match the kit to the soldiers.