Around 5:35 a.m. on Jan. 28, 2024, a drone flew in a low flight path across northeastern Jordan and reached its target: a U.S. military base known as Tower 22.

“I was woken up with what sounded like a low rumble,” a California Army National Guard captain, whose name was withheld for operational security, told the U.S. Army. “My whole room started vibrating and I thought, ‘That’s not normal.’ A split second later—impact.”

The one-way unmanned aircraft system (UAS) struck a six-person housing unit while most of the 350 service members on the base were still asleep, obliterating the housing unit and severely damaging others nearby, according to a U.S. Army Central after-action report dated January 2024.

The attack killed three soldiers, Sgt. William Rivers and Spcs. Kennedy Sanders and Breonna Moffett, who were all assigned to the 718th Engineer Company from Fort Benning, Georgia. More than 100 others were wounded.

The attack underscores the growing threat of drones on the modern battlefield. These unmanned systems are an “urgent and enduring threat” and are “changing how wars are fought,” according to a DoD news release from December 2024.

“Conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine demonstrate how advances in hardware, software and tactics are making drones more autonomous, easily acquired and deadlier,” Maj. Gen. David Stewart, director of the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee’s air and land forces subcommittee in May. “Compared to the IEDs that killed and injured thousands of American service members, UASs are more dangerous because they actively surveil, target and deliver lethal effects from the air.”

The threat from UASs “is present and constantly evolving,” Stewart said.

The Army has taken note, pursuing new capabilities to counter drone threats while ramping up training and education for soldiers, from basic training to specialized courses.

“We fully acknowledge the threat and the proliferation of these systems, both abroad and at home, and we collectively … are acting with urgency,” Lt. Gen. Robert Collins, principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said during the May subcommittee hearing. “We are generating momentum, and we are aggressively pressing ahead.”

Preparing Troops

Given the proliferation of UASs, soldiers must be prepared to effectively counter the threat, Master Sgt. James Hollinger, an electromagnetic warfare instructor at the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, said in February in a Maneuver Center of Excellence video.

“UAS … is a big threat today, and it’s going to continue to be a big threat in the future,” Hollinger said. “Every soldier needs to understand the threat of UAS. If we have capabilities … that can help protect soldiers, they obviously need to know how to employ them, how to use them and what kind of effects it can have on UAS in order to protect themselves.”

During the small-UAS master trainer course at Fort Benning, a three-week program focused on developing troops to serve as unit master trainers, students are exposed to counter-UAS demonstrations using equipment like the DroneBuster Detect, Track, Identify, Mitigate kit.

The kit’s wearable system detects, tracks and identifies drones, and the handheld Dronebuster neutralizes enemy UASs via electronic attack, putting enemy UASs in a continual hover or forcing them to fall out of the sky once the trigger is pulled.

In addition to technology, learning from drone use in global conflicts is essential to effective drone training, said Matthew Theilacker, training instructor at the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems University at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. During a counter-small UAS operators course, for example, service members are trained to effectively counter UAS threats with large-scale combat operations in mind.

“Currently, our drone training is to simulate what may be going on overseas and to replicate that threat for the operators course,” he said. “So, we’re going to be able to simulate the types of ways that the foreign nations are flying their drones to represent the threat and … make it real-world-scenario-based.”

Further, a proactive strategy to counter the UAS threat requires soldiers to train beyond reacting to drones and prioritize “training to deter, deny and defeat them before they can even impact a mission,” said Col. Douglas Serie, commander of First Army’s 5th Armored Brigade. The brigade offers crucial drone training for soldiers in the Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve prior to deployment.

“We will never go into a conflict ... as a singular [Regular Army] force,” Serie said. “Our work directly impacts the operational success of our [Army National Guard and Army Reserve] partners. Units that come through our pipeline are getting ready to deploy, and from our training, they’re deploying with the confidence and competency needed to deal with what we’re seeing forward.”

From the Start

Through leadership and support from the U.S. Army Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, the Joint Counter-small UAS University is involved in the integration of counter-UAS training into Basic Combat Training as part of an effort to familiarize soldiers with UAS concepts early in their Army careers.

“One of the biggest things is just that we need to start inculcating small UAS from day one,” said Col. Moseph Sauda, director of the Joint Counter-small UAS University. “That’s one of the inputs that I immediately gave. What I’m referring to is the day you step off of a bus, you are seeing UAS for the first time. We don’t want this to be a shock, right? We want you to know that this is a problem [and] what it sounds like day one.”

During The Forge, the capstone field training exercise during Basic Combat Training, recruits are taught to conceal themselves and notify their leadership about drone activity, said Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Brezenski, a small-UAS master trainer with the 198th Infantry Brigade at Fort Benning.

If a drone is detected, the trainee is instructed to “find concealment and then start giving a description and direction of where the drone is coming from,” he said. “That way, leadership can … call up to higher and ask, ‘Are there adjacent or friendly units adjacent to us? Are there suspected enemy drones?’ ”

During situational training after The Forge, live drone assets are incorporated into counter-drone scenarios for trainees, Brezenski said. “Whenever they’re out doing … their situational training, we act as … enemy air,” he said.

In a typical scenario, trainees may be on a mission to assault a bunker when a drone comes in overhead. “We fly in the vicinity of them, close enough to where they can hear us, and they can visually see the drone, and then they can react,” Brezenski said. “And then we can evaluate how well they react or how poorly they react.”

Educating soldiers on the basics of UASs creates a vital sense of awareness, Sauda said. A Group 1 or small UAS that’s 100 feet off the ground and 100 feet away “could look invisible depending on how big it is,” he said. “You may not hear a thing until it’s on you, so we want to make sure service members are aware of that [from] day one.”

At every step throughout a soldier’s career, the Army carefully balances the amount of information troops will need to progress.

“When I bring a soldier, a sailor, an airman, a Marine into their basic or initial training, how much counter-UAS are they learning? What’s too much? What’s not enough? At every step up in your career at every institutional level, what should they know?” Sauda said.

Once a soldier gets more advanced training, “the difficulty that you may run into ... is now you’ve got to somehow keep those personnel in place long enough to get your value out of them, because they’re going to be highly sought after,” Sauda said. “So, your [drone] specialists are going to be difficult to spread across the entire force.”

Future Threats

UASs are redefining aerial threats by bringing threats much closer to troops than ever before, Serie said. Unmanned aircraft systems represent a shift “when we think about things in the air,” he said.

While helicopter threats regularly fly at 500 feet or higher, drones pose a different risk. “In the air-ground littoral, that’s no longer the case,” Serie said. “The threat is there at just a few feet above ground level.”

To outpace enemy UASs, the Army is utilizing innovative ways to more effectively defeat them, including directed energy weapons or lasers.

“The Army is learning about capabilities and limitations of [directed energy] systems in an operational environment,” Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey, commander of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, wrote in April testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee. “Directed energy … weapons offer great potential to reduce cost-per-kill, expand magazine depths, and simplify logistics by eliminating the use and transport of munitions altogether.”

The Army’s ability to sense small UASs, even those flying to evade detection, is also deepening, Gainey said during a May media roundtable at the Pentagon. “The Army has done a lot of work specifically in the sensing for low, slow and small-type targets,” he said. “With technology and seeing some of the lessons learned in Ukraine, other types of sensing, like acoustic sensing, is coming on board, [as is a] smaller, more transportable type of radar sensing.”

Counter-UAS capabilities will remain critical on the future battlefield, Gainey said. “Air and missile defense and counter-UAS capabilities are critical capabilities on the battlefield,” he said. “We’re finding more and more through lessons learned that being able to operate in a denied or degraded environment is essential.”

As UASs and their capabilities continue to evolve rapidly, proactive training is essential to stay ahead of the threat of adversary UASs, Serie said. “The drone threat is no longer a theoretical. It’s here, and it’s real, it’s persistent, and it’s evolving rapidly,” he said. “And staying relevant in the training is critical to what we are doing to stay ahead of the threat.”