In early 2025, several nondescript cargo trucks loaded with smuggled drones and remote-controlled lids arrived near at least four key air bases in Russia. The drones were deployed from the trucks by Ukraine on June 1 in a coordinated strike, destroying or severely damaging as many as 20 Russian strategic aircraft and dealing a major blow to Russia’s long-range strike capabilities.

Dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, the meticulously planned and daring attack marked a new dimension to the already fast-moving drone warfare and spurred warnings that copycat attacks could strike deep into the U.S. homeland.

“What we saw in Russia will play out here,” Adam Lowery, chief executive officer of Epirus, which developed microwave defense systems, told The New York Times. “Operation Spider’s Web should be a real wake-up call to us, to the whole world, that this is very, very serious.”

At the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the Army’s contingency response force in Europe, soldiers have been paying close attention to lessons from the war in Ukraine. From its home station in Vicenza, Italy, the brigade, the only U.S. unit of its kind that’s permanently stationed in Europe, has capitalized on opportunities to innovate, creating a group that would become known as the Bayonet Innovation Team.

Unique View

“Our proximity to that [Ukraine] conflict and our involvement in some of the organizations that support different advise-and-assist efforts really made it evident to us and extremely clear that there were capability gaps resulting from rapid changes,” said 1st Lt. Vincent Gasparri, director of the Bayonet Innovation Team. “Our brigade commander at the time said, ‘Look, we’ve got to dedicate people to these problem sets to shrink those capability gaps,’ and that was the origin of the team.”

What began as a team looking to invest in drones quickly grew. The team initially was meant to “operate as an independent, dedicated body to all things innovation and modernization for our brigade,” Gasparri said. At the time, that meant buying and using unmanned aircraft systems. “Now, we’ve evolved. The scope has broadened, our resources have broadened, and certainly personnel has broadened to the point that we can attack a higher number of projects,” he said.

Now, the team builds its own drones, including first-person view drones that enable operators to see targets before striking and can reach far beyond the front line. The soldiers also work on command and control to streamline commanders’ decision-making during vital moments on the battlefield.

One of several innovation initiatives or labs that have sprung up in units across the Army since the service began its push toward continuous transformation, the Bayonet Innovation Team is unusual for being a brigade-level initiative and for its proximity to the fighting in Ukraine, whose armed forces have led the way in taking drone warfare to the next level.

Adding to the uniqueness of the Bayonet Innovation Team, it’s led by lieutenants and fueled by soldiers who are adapting to the needs of the future fight and innovating from the bottom up.

“The modern battlefield is changing. I think we’ve seen that, and we have learned a lot over the last year and a half with our transformation in contact,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said in an interview with the War on the Rocks podcast in May. “So, this is bottom-up innovation that we know we need.” He added, “Soldiers know the problems they’re trying to solve. They know what they need in these environments.”

Capability Gap

During the global war on terrorism, the U.S. and its allies didn’t have to worry about threats from the sky, said Col. Mark Bush, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. “Our ability to put things into the air for observation, to fly resupply, to fly people without threat” of “any type of ground-to-air or air-to-air interference” was “absolutely uncontended,” he said.

Today, soldiers operate in contested environments as adversaries compete for airspace superiority. “It makes a subordinate leader’s ability to plan that much more challenging, because instead of having uncontested options to move people, to move equipment, to get behind a threat, to get to the side of the threat, our ability to operate within the air domain is just so much more challenged,” Bush said. “Our adversary gets so much more of a say in what happens in that domain now.”

As a result of the developing threat environment, the Army has looked to technology to reduce soldiers’ risk on the battlefield from air or ground-based threats, he said. “Whether it’s from a vertical threat from something that’s in the air, whether it’s something on the ground, where ... can [we] put a robot in the place of a human on the battlefield and reduce the risk to the individual?” he said.

The Army’s retirement of the Shadow and Raven drones created a capability gap that soldiers with the 173rd Airborne Brigade were eager to seize upon. Those drone models are not vertical take-off and landing aircraft, said 1st Lt. Frank La Torre, the Bayonet Innovation Team’s director of robotics and autonomous systems.

Under the retired systems, capability limitations meant soldiers had to place themselves in harm’s way to use the aircraft. “There was an issue where soldiers had to expose themselves, oftentimes when in contact, to be able to employ these,” La Torre said.

Gasparri added, “After those systems were retired, there was certainly a gap to fill both the functions of those as well as new functions and new capabilities that we’re seeing on the battleground.”

To bring the unit’s capabilities up to speed, the team worked to “supplement and replace the intelligence, search and reconnaissance capabilities” of the retired drones while also developing short-range attack and tactical kinetic systems to “be ready for the modern battlefield,” he said.

At the time, there also was a training gap, with only a finite number of people who could fly assets and deliver persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, Gasparri added.

With the systems built by the brigade, soldiers can employ expendable drones “just by lifting their hand up to the sky” or setting the drone “in an area where there’s no overhead coverage,” backing away and employing it from the ground, he said. “There’s more, much more flexibility.”

To meet the needs of the modern battlefield, the Bayonet Innovation Team also is advancing command-and-control capabilities.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence and communication technologies that have been accelerated by the Russia-Ukraine war “have shown us that there’s a need to be faster to manage data, absorb data, apply computation, artificial intelligence to drive decisions,” Gasparri said.

“We’re focused on ingesting the increasing magnitude of battlefield data from sensors, like drones, into effective computation and artificial intelligence applications that can produce actionable decision-making, either data or visualizations for commanders,” he said.

Incorporating battlefield data from technology and distilling it for leadership accelerates decision- making time and decreases inefficiencies within the kill chain, La Torre said, citing a training exercise in Pabrade, Lithuania, in May.

During the exercise, the opposing force used a long-range reconnaissance asset connected to IBM oLabs’ MARRS software—a sensor data ingestion platform that applies artificial intelligence to enable rapid target recognition and made the opposing force four times more lethal than the group without target recognition capabilities, La Torre said. Instead of having a geospatial intelligence imagery analyst look for enemies on a screen, soldiers utilized IBM oLabs software during a situational training exercise.

Soldiers from the brigade who utilized the automatic target recognition called in 40 fire missions compared to just 10 from the control group, he said. Eventually, La Torre hopes the same visualizations and data that can assist commanders on the battlefield can enable them to visualize an inventory of available systems and their location information in garrison and distill it into a meaningful, streamlined display for leaders.

The Future Fight

Just a few months after the brigade demonstrated its ability to use first-person view drones against a simulated enemy and an SUV-sized target during the May training exercise in Lithuania, the brigade made history.

The Bayonet Innovation Team, Pennsylvania Army National Guard and engineers from U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command demonstrated the Army’s first drone-on-drone kill during the service’s Unmanned Aerial Systems and Launched Effects Summit in August at Fort Rucker, Alabama.

“At this time last year, this kind of training was a pipe dream for conventional units,” La Torre told the Army after the successful drone demonstration. “It feels extremely satisfying to have this level of impact, but solving these kinds of problems should not be alien to junior officers, or any leader.”

Bush hopes the Bayonet Innovation Team will inspire brigade-level innovation throughout the Army.

“It hurts when you pull talented young leaders out of the formation and ask them to stop doing the thing that they join the Army to do, to contribute to a very important problem set,” Bush said. “But we have an opportunity to take [soldiers’] talent and apply it against things that are important for the brigade” and “important for the whole Army to do.”

Changes and innovations pioneered by the team impact the future fight, Bush said.

“I think reducing the risk to our individuals, our soldiers, our formations, the people that serve within the brigade, that’s the biggest problem,” he said. “The solutions they’re developing” and solutions that are being developed across the Army are “enhancing our ability to be lethal, which is what’s required of us, while reducing risk to the people we’re responsible for.”

Fostering a spirit of innovation across the Army remains essential, La Torre said. “Looking ahead ... my hopes for the Army is that the Army continues to foster unit-level innovation,” he said. “The 173rd is not a [transforming in contact] unit, but we’re able to transform in contact just because of that general theme of transformation across the Army.”

La Torre said he hopes the continuous transformation mindset never goes away, and “that soldiers are empowered and they have autonomy and ownership to develop capabilities and contribute to their own survivability and success.”