Reps. Pat Ryan (D-NY), and Rob Wittman (R-VA) set up the caucus in early 2024 to strategically inform legislation to improve the Defense Department’s adoption of modern software and warfighting capabilities.

“This is what happens when you get industry, academia, and members of Congress who refuse to maintain the status quo together in a room. We’re going to keep pushing as hard as we can,” a senior member on Ryan’s team told DefenseScoop on Friday.

Early this year, Ryan and Wittman formally solicited policy proposals and focus areas from stakeholders across industry and academia to puzzle out the reforms. The caucus also set up a unique portal for modernization-related recommendations.

“We need to put disruptive technologies in the hands of warfighters, we need more competition in the defense industrial base, and we need to cut down pointless red tape and bureaucracy. Congress must be relentlessly focused on providing the U.S. military with the capabilities and capacity necessary to deter our adversaries — we cannot afford complacency,” Wittman said in a statement.

The senior House staffer previewed some of the caucus-inspired inclusions and amendments that made it into the massive defense package.

The NDAA includes language that would:

• Accelerate the DOD’s counter-unmanned aerial system operations and authorities to protect military operations and other specific locations around the U.S.
• Add additional reporting requirements to the Authority to Operate (ATO) process and streamline timelines for such approvals
• Require the Pentagon to develop and maintain a virtual sandbox environment for operational testing and development
• Require the secretary of defense to brief Congress on the integration of AI and machine learning across the department
• Empower the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to expand outreach and create additional onramp hubs domestically and internationally
• Direct DOD leadership to submit a plan to accelerate the accreditation, construction, and operational use of commercial Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF) accessible to industry
• Seek to streamline and simplify the requirements for a modular open system approach to the design and development of a major weapon system.

“This didn’t happen overnight,” the senior official said. “This was a collaborative process over the course of many months, and it’s truly only just the beginning of what we can accomplish in the future.”

Beyond Ryan and Wittman, they said other members of the caucus who serve on HASC and helped champion these and additional efforts include: Reps. Seth Moulton (D-MA), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Chris Deluzio (D-PA), Don Bacon (R-NE), John McGuire (R-VA), Pat Fallon (R-TX), George Whitesides (D-CA), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Wesley Bell (D-MO) and Mark Messmer (R-IN). 

“Stay tuned, because we’re only just getting started,” Ryan said in a statement.

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While the organization’s counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) efforts date back several years, the work by the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center is part of Project Flytrap taking place in Europe.

Flytrap is a joint U.S. and U.K. effort to test new counter-UAS technologies in order to eventually incorporate them into formations. It began in the European theater last month, and may become a standard, yearly exercise, expanding on innovation and experimentation while building on lessons learned, Army officials said.

The event initially sought to bring these technologies down to the squad level and seek to lower the cost per drone defeated through new methods and technologies.

The U.S. military has been behind the cost curve when trying to thwart small drones, using million-dollar missiles to defeat large numbers of inexpensive UAS.

C-UAS has proved to be a difficult problem for the Army and joint force, dating back several years when terrorist and insurgent groups in the Middle East began strapping homemade explosives onto commercial drones and dropping them on troops’ positions.

The problem has grown since then, as evidenced in Ukraine’s war with Russia where first-person-view drones have been a prominent fixture of the fight. Based on its observations, the Army has realized it must up its game to protect its own forces from these types of attacks that will be inevitable in future conflicts.

Part of the problem is there aren’t many commercial C-UAS solutions on the market, akin to the ballooning availability of drones. And even if there were easy counter-drone solutions on the market, the military must knit them together to create a system of systems for thwarting overhead threats through a command and control architecture.

That’s where the C5ISR Center comes in.

“The genesis of it was create a C2 architecture that worked for counter-UAS that included individual soldiers all the way up to our joint partners,” Brandon Dodd, mechanical engineer with C5ISR Center, said in an interview. “How are we going to get data from individual sensors to individual soldiers and then all the way up and over to our partners? How does that look at each level? Where are the hiccups throughout that architecture? That’s where we came in, was we had some projects that were existing in counter-UAS.”

Flytrap aims to not only develop and test counter-UAS technologies and strategies, but inform new tactics for the Army in how to thwart these threats in the future.

The C5ISR Center serves as the Army’s science and technology hub, looking at problems and gaps that exist and beginning research and development through government solutions, at first, to solve them. They then work with industry to proliferate those solutions and get them into the field to soldiers and units.

The work for Flytrap is no different.

The C5ISR Center began by looking at best-of-breed sensors and working to link them up through a command and control architecture through the Army’s Android Tactical Assault Kit, or ATAK, where data from the sensors were shared across the force.

That work started with a set of commercial-off-the-shelf sensors that initially were stationary and tripod mounted.

The team then transitioned those stationary capabilities to vehicle-mounted tools to allow units to sense on the move — a more realistic scenario given these are maneuver units that have to go fast on the battlefield.

“Through rapid innovation, we’ve been able to adapt our sensors and effectors that are traditionally static and turn them into something mobile that fits the needs of the Army. To me, as a former operator, that’s a really big deal to have something that you can actually use when you go outside the wire,” Mike Moore, an engineering technician with the C5ISR Center who has been on the ground supporting Flytrap, said. “We’ve been able to mold the sensors and effectors and infuse them into a way that meets the soldiers’ needs on the ground, using a layered approach to command and control. The layered approaches we found is a necessity. We created one common operating picture using ATAK, something that that soldiers already have, we didn’t invent something new.”

The C5ISR team worked tightly with various industry partners on not only the vehicle integration, but constant software fixes and iteration in real-time with the unit to improve how the system worked based on feedback from troops during the exercise.

“We’ve shown that through some of our sensors that we’ve been able to solve these … lengthy software development problems very rapidly through how soldiers actually use the equipment and the tactics in which they employ them,” Moore said.

The team worked with V Corps and specifically 2nd Cavalry Regiment, initially planning to outfit a platoon but grew to a company element. The exercise has used Strkyers thus far, but the technologies are meant to be platform agnostic and capable across domains, officials said.

There were challenges to adapting a static, stationary sensor system to something that was mobile. Physics constraints posed challenges such as certain acoustic sensors that become more limited when they’re moving. The team at first developed quick fixes with industry to determine how best to employ the sensors in a way that they remain effective and still support maneuver operations.

One of those fixes was a way to pull the sensors off and set them up in a timely manner to provide the coverage needed.

The team developed a couple of different command and control layers — mostly through ATAK — and a variety of sensing modalities for drone detection and one modality for defeating them.

Sensor fusion was developed as to not cognitively overburden soldiers and reduce the amount of information they received. The C2 architecture allowed forces to not be co-located with the sensor and effector in order to use it. Because it was tied to ATAK, forces up and down echelon could track systems and cue the effectors, allowing for distributed command and control.

The government and industry teams were working hand-in-hand on the integration software in near real-time during the exercise.

“In terms of the other sensors where we created a whole new way for this for soldiers to employ them, we worked directly at the exercise with the vendor where we were modifying how our integration software works, how we were displaying things on a C2 system,” Dodd said. “Those things were stuff that we modified on the government side while the vendor actually was modifying their proprietary software on their side.”

Soldiers tested these sensors and systems in realistic environments overseas in almost live-fire scenarios.

“We’ve been able to incorporate realistic scenarios and knowledge of current [tactics, techniques and procedures] to help push these systems in a direction that apply real-world lessons learned. We’re not we’re not just creating something that works. We’re creating something that works in our current environment,” Moore said, adding there was an opposing force going against the unit while it maneuvered.

The next iteration of Flytrap will take place at the end of this month and will focus on conducting counter-UAS operations at the company and battalion-minus level for multi-day missions, according to Army officials. The soldiers will see a faster tempo, more realistic scenario to stress their skills and the systems.

“As we get into the exercise occurring in July, that’s certainly going to ramp up more where there’s even more live threats and it’s even more realistic for what they might see in a place like Ukraine,” Kevin White, global operation support and threat chief at C5ISR Center, said.

Officials noted that the team and unit have gone through the early phases and are hitting their stride through the first couple of iterations.

“Now it’s really, we do have some minor tweaks that we’re going to make from the engineering or technical aspects, but most of it is allowing the soldiers to now utilize what they’ve learned over the last few exercises and employ them while doing their other job,” Dodd said. “Allow a maneuver unit to do their normal mission and then add counter-UAS as the aside, that we see it going to be. Do that and then slowly ramp that up throughout the next exercise so that we stress it to its max while seeing what lessons [were] learned or how they incorporated it to their current mission.”

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“We recently did a session with the secretary of defense and we are going to stand up a joint interagency task force” focused on thwarting drones, Gen. James Mingus, vice chief of staff of the Army, said during an event Wednesday co-hosted by AUSA and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), as it is known in DOD parlance, is a key challenge for the military. Commercial technology has evolved in recent years such that drones on the civilian market are extremely cheap to buy and simple to operate. It has also become less challenging to 3D print parts and devices that can fly.

This has made it significantly easier for nation-states and terrorist groups to procure these types of systems and strap bombs to them, allowing adversaries to level the playing field against higher-tech combatants such as the U.S. military.

The C-UAS challenge has existed for about a decade as insurgent groups in the Middle East began acquiring these systems and targeting American troops, marking the first time since the Vietnam War that U.S. service members didn’t have full control of the skies and faced an aerial threat on the ground.

The Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict a few years ago was also a global watershed, serving as one of the first instances where drones helped win a war.

As has been seen in Ukraine, both Kiev and its Russian foes have taken to using first-person-view drones as missiles, turning the battlefield into something more akin to World War I-style warfare where troops are limited in movement due to the risk of being seen and shot on the battlefield.

The Ukrainians have perfecting the use of these capabilities, leveling the playing field against the Russians — whose military was much larger and possessed significantly more firepower — by taking out tanks with FPV drones.

“One junior sergeant in the 47th Ukraine mechanized brigade, he got the Order of the Gold Star and Hero of Ukraine [awards] because he is credited [with] 434 enemy killed, 336 enemy wounded, 42 tanks destroyed, 44 infantry fighting vehicles, 10 tracked amphibs and 20 armored personnel carriers all destroyed in a five-month period. He is a first-person-view drone pilot,” Lt. Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, director for joint force development on the American military’s Joint Staff, said at a special operations symposium hosted by NDIA in February. “That is what he brings — the lethality of about a division. I mean, that is an incredible record.”

Similarly, the Houthis, a group backed by Iran that has controlled portions of Yemen, including the capital, since 2014, have been executing a multi-year on and off again onslaught against commercial and military ships transiting the Red Sea as a protest against Western support for Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas.

While most of those drones were neutralized, the U.S. military is losing the cost-curve battle by using million-dollar missiles to defeat large numbers of inexpensive UAS.

Mingus equated the C-UAS challenge today to the effort to counter improvised explosive devices during the Global War on Terror. Insurgents began fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq with remotely controlled roadside bombs, to great effect, catalyzing a joint and interagency effort by the United States called the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization. The nation also mobilized with great speed to produce Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, which saved countless lives.

Mingus offered few details regarding the new counter-drone task force, but noted it’s something officials have been advocating for a while.

“We need an organization that is joint, interagency, has authorities, a colorless pot of money and the authorities to go after from requirements all the way through acquisition in a rapid way to be able to keep pace with that. We are in the process of standing that organization up and get it going,” he said. “The Army is going to lead it, but this will be a joint organization to be able to deal with joint solutions in the future. We’ve been trying to advocate this for some time now, and the secretary recently made the decision to allow us to move out on it, because we cannot move fast enough in this space.”

As part of the Army’s budget request this year, it has sought to add a new agile line for C-UAS, along with UAS and electronic warfare, to be able to keep pace with emerging technologies and changing battlefields.

“Once we think we’ve got it figured it out, then the adversary is going to come up with something and we need … to be able to evolve. This is not going to be a static environment. It’s got to be something that’s moving at the rate in which the technology is moving on the other end,” he said. “Instead of like we have done in the past, where we’ll buy a system and buy that same system for 20 years, we’re going to have to have both the flexible funding to go with it and the agility to [acquire] whatever is out there that will deal with the threats today, in the next year. It may be something different. We’ve got to have both the authority and then the funding flexibility to be able to switch to whatever that solution is going to be for the next year.”

Part of the challenge for C-UAS is there isn’t a mature commercial market akin to the UAS market, meaning solutions need to be bespoke and purpose-built.

Mingus said countering drones requires a layered approach.

“No single solution. It’s got to be at every level. It’s got to be layered. Every squad’s got to be able to protect itself, all the way up to formations that provide higher-end capability,” he said. “There’s going to be a multitude of solutions — long, short and close in — that are out there.”

He added that officials want a combination of lasers, high-powered microwaves and interceptors, which will be key to driving down costs.

“Interceptors that continue to come down in cost, so that the price point between shot and what the adversary is doing … has to be in line. We can’t shoot a $130,000 missile at a $1,000 drone. We’ve got to get the price points down. But there’s an interceptor role that’s out there,” Mingus said.

The Army currently leads the military’s Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO. Mingus on Wednesday did not flesh out what the relationship will be between the JCO and the new counter-drone task force.

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Detailed budget materials are being released on a rolling basis this week, but the officials provided insights into the nearly $1 trillion spending plan in an off-camera press briefing Thursday morning.

“This budget is the first year that we are calling out — specifically — our autonomy line in its own section. So, it will be $13.4 billion for autonomy and autonomous systems,” a senior defense official told DefenseScoop. 

“For counter [unmanned aerial systems], the total request is $3.1 billion across the services,” they also confirmed. 

The new requests for additional drone and counter-drone funding come as the U.S. military confronts serious challenges integrating and defending against the rapidly evolving weapons, which often cost much less to produce than the multimilllion-dollar missiles that have been deployed to take them down.

The senior defense official supplied a high-level breakdown on the robotics and autonomy-enabling budget lines.

“For unmanned and remotely-operated aerial vehicles, it’s $9.4 billion; autonomous ground vehicles, $210 million; on the water autonomous systems, $1.7 billion; underwater capabilities, $734 million; and enabling capabilities — that’s the autonomy software, the things that underlie all these systems, working and operating together as a central brain — it’s $1.2 billion to work across all those platforms on autonomy,” they said.

A senior Navy official at the briefing also pointed to what they consider to be a “big increase” associated with autonomy investments for the sea service.

“[It’s] $5.3 billion across all systems. And that’s $2.2 billion above FY 2025. That includes procuring three MQ-25s, which we’ll have our first flight in 2026 — and then additional unmanned air [assets], new efforts in unmanned undersea and in unmanned surface, to include procuring our medium unmanned surface vessel. So, we have a lot of efforts across all domains,” the senior Navy official told DefenseScoop.

Two aircraft carrier strike groups operating in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility are “engaged in combat every day” against enemy-launched drones, they noted.

“We have the [USS Gerald R. Ford] that is just now deploying. Ford will deploy with some additional counter-UAS capabilities, and then we’ll continue to look and learn and develop those kits that we sent before, and [applying] part of what we’re learning,” the senior Navy official said.

Representatives from the other military services did not share information about their departments’ autonomy toplines during the briefing.

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This massive, in-the-works fortification will include a combination of surveillance assets, multilayer sensors, countermeasure platforms, and uncrewed systems that can take out hostile enemy drones across the roughly 183-mile border, which also marks a major boundary shared between Russia and the NATO alliance.

Members of Estonia’s Police and Border Guard Board briefed DefenseScoop and others participating in the country’s Defence Study Programme on their unfolding drone wall development aims during a tour of multiple locations Tuesday. The officials were granted anonymity to speak freely about the effort.

“In 2027, there should be a so-called drone wall on the borderline. It consists of different equipment that can detect these low-flying objects. And then, if we know where the drone is, we can use it and take it out,” a border patrol officer told DefenseScoop.

While police and border agents are behind the launch of this new technology-driven security system, they’ll work closely with their counterparts in the Estonian Defence Forces regarding the detections and mitigation actions they’ll take in response to incidents. 

Estonia’s Defense League also recently established a new dedicated drone warfare unit.

In many ways, the envisioned drone wall was inspired by Estonia’s allies in Ukraine, who — although outnumbered — have successfully countered a variety of Russian advances with a mix of weapons, electronic warfare and drones since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

“The new thing is drones. Our aim is that every car on patrol must have a drone with them, and every police officer or border guard officer has to have the capability to operate the drone — because we see the drone as flying binoculars. For us, it just expands the range of the patrol very much,” a second border patrol officer said.

“Right now, we have the small drones. But in the future, we’ll also have the specialized unit, which has bigger drones, and this fixed-wing drone, which looks like a small plane. They have special training — and if we need to see something further away, we call them, and they come and make the video,” he added.

A Chinese-made DJI drone was on display during the tour. Despite security concerns amplified by the U.S., the officials said that specific product has performed repeatedly well for their missions. The systems are also hosted on a network that doesn’t interfere with Estonia’s more sensitive and exquisite capabilities. 

The officials also showed off recently acquired equipment that can completely knock out enemy or criminal drones. 

“It can jam the signal from the operator to the drone and also jam the GPS. So it’s quite powerful, and our Fast Response Unit, who is also stationed in this building, has made some training with it, and it really works on the drone. The drone comes down,” a border patrol officer said. 

“I had the training just to see if it really works. So maybe the drone was approximately 200 or 300 meters away. And yeah, it worked — because there were lots of us, and everyone wanted to practice,” another officer told DefenseScoop.

The team said they haven’t taken out any Russian unmanned aerial systems near the border to date, noting they’re in need of new systems that enable drone detection and tracking. 

“We have little or no cases this year. But, we have found people who were lost in the forest actually,” using drones and other surveillance assets, a border patrol officer noted. 

The new drone wall is estimated to cost the nation up to €20 million, once completed. 

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At a House Armed Services Committee posture hearing, the U.S. Central Command commander shared new details about that operation and said it underscores the military’s intensifying need for more and better counter-drone technologies and software.

“We absolutely need to be putting more work into directed energy [and] high-powered microwaves, I think, are some of the innovations that have come out of this since Operation Rough Rider. About 40% of the drones shot down were shot down by something called Advanced Precision Weapon Kill System, a laser-guided 2.75-inch rocket fired off our F-16s or F-15s. That’s a $25,000 munition going against a roughly $50,000 or $100,000 drone — that is an Iranian-provided drone,” Kurilla said.

Iran-backed Houthi fighters based in Yemen kicked off their attacks against vessels traversing crucial international shipping routes near the Red Sea in 2023. They indicated the disruption was meant as a form of protest of America’s support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

Early into his second administration, President Donald Trump initiated Operation Rough Rider to dismantle Houthi infrastructure and leadership in the region. Trump announced an end to the operation in early May, following an agreement between America and the Houthis — brokered in part through the Omani government — to suspend the strikes.

Operation Rough Rider cost the U.S. an estimated $1 billion, lawmakers pointed out at the posture hearing. It also resulted in the loss of multiple high-dollar military drones and fighter aircraft. 

“The president gave us a very specific mission, which was to get the Houthis to quit shooting at American ships. Six months ago on 12 November 2024, was the last time a destroyer went through the Bab-el-Mandeb. It was attacked 17 times with anti-ship ballistic missiles and anti-ship cruise missiles and [unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs]. In the last week, we put four destroyers back through the Bab-el-Mandeb,” Kurilla said.

After the conclusion of Rough Rider, however, Centcom is “still defending Israel with” its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system against ongoing assaults from the Houthis, which remain under the foreign terrorist organization designation by the U.S.

In the operation’s aftermath though, one major lesson the command learned, as Kurilla put it, is that “software is a weapon” that is rapidly changing the character of warfare.

“Our ability to do Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the things that we are doing with software — it’s amazing. We have advanced that. We have engineers every day making improvements on our ability to do that. It’s a warfighting headquarters,” Kurilla said.

Software is also driving significant transformations in ballistic missile defense on the contemporary battlefield, the commander noted.

“The same thing, I would tell you, as it comes to counter-UAS as well. We are making changes to the Navy’s software on the SPY radars based on what we’re seeing,” Kurilla told the committee. 

When asked by lawmakers to recommend the top weapons capabilities he views they should most quickly invest in, the commander repeatedly pointed to counter-drone systems, calling them the “number one” in-demand tool at this time.

“We’re only going to see the systems get smaller, more lethal. [On] the electromagnetic spectrum, we try and jam that. That’s why Ukraine and Russia went to fiber optics — going out to 40 kilometers with fiber optic drones — you can’t jam that. So those are the things I would ask for right now, the counter-UAS [and detection capabilities]. I think we need to put aerial [Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radars or ISAR] for low-radar cross section to be able to pick up, elevate it, and then [use] ballistic missile defense,” Kurilla said. 

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The brigade is participating in the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center Exportable exercise in the Philippines with that nation’s 7th and 5th Infantry Divisions and an Australian infantry element. The unit was one of the first three brigades to participate in the first iteration of the Army’s so-called transforming-in-contact initiative, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

TiC 1.0 was centered around light units. But now, TiC 2.0 is focusing on divisions as a whole, to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades, as well as Multi-Domain Task Forces, some Army special operations units, National Guard units and armored formations.

Experimenting with 3D printing assets forward in theater is providing not only valuable lessons, but increasing the combat capability for 2nd Brigade and the 25th ID as a whole.

“The closer we can get that capability to the edge or that capability as close as we can to the soldiers that are employing it and realizing where adjustments need to be made, the quicker we can innovate and improve overall lethality,” Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, commander of 25th Infantry Division, said in an interview Tuesday.

In one example, Evans said soldiers provided a recommendation for modifying a piece of equipment that the 3D printing was able to repair and make the modifications. He added while that was just one small example, the possibilities are endless.

This was a lesson directly from the European theater and Ukraine’s war with Russia. The Ukrainian army is providing, in many instances, a bevy of case studies for how future conflict will be fought and how tactical victories can be achieved.

By some estimates, there are thousands of drones flying on the battlefield, either for reconnaissance or as one-way attack weapons. The ability to rapidly repair or build new devices at the pace of operations has been critical.

Such a capability will also be needed in the Pacific theater, given the complex environment of various islands that forces will need to operate from, across vast distances. Forward-placed 3D printers will enable forces to maintain capabilities without long supply lines.

“It provides agility, it provides redundancy, and allows us to diversify our supply lines. From a commander perspective, all of those increase the ability to protect ourselves and project lethal formations and sustain lethal formations without always having to rely on an elongated supply line, which, as you’re aware, is very [susceptible] to interdiction to various kinds of attacks,” Evans said. “Now you’ve essentially moved a sustainment capability as far forward as possible and placed it organic to a formation that is doing the majority of the training and the focusing on lethality.”

The division is in the early stages of figuring out how to employ such a capability, to include how to maneuver it and protect it from being targeted by the enemy.

“A consideration is we know that that capability will be targeted. We have to understand how we move it, we have to understand how we protect it, how we get it into positions where it can hide in plain sight and continue to support soldiers,” Evans said.

On the flip side, he said they’re maturing counter-drone capabilities as well. While the Army has been experimenting a lot with commercial unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS poses much more significant challenges given there aren’t many advanced commercial solutions available.

2nd Brigade improved its ability to detect and defend itself from incoming drones from its combat training center rotation in October in Hawaii.

For example, in one instance, a multi-domain reconnaissance team had activated a counter-UAS sensor notifying them of incoming drones approximately 15 minutes out. They were able to adjust their camouflage, preventing the enemy UAS from finding them.

Roughly 24 hours later, the unit was able to passively defeat another incoming drone, returning it to its control station.

“That is one small example of something we were not as proficient at in October, but we’ve certainly seen an increase in the use capability and understanding of employing that counter-UAS mechanism,” Evans said.

The division is also working on improving how it sees itself within the electromagnetic spectrum. There continues to be increased requirements for electronic warfare and counter-drone capabilities, Evans noted.

“The ability to scale and provide as many command posts and units in the field coverage, both from in the electromagnetic spectrum and also from the counter-UAS capability,” is important, he said. Since last October, “we have received additional equipment in terms of electronic warfare and in terms of counter-UAS equipment, which we have been able to employ here, generally, pretty effectively.”

EW tools can also be used in the counter-drone realm to jam signals.

Moreover, understanding a unit’s signature will allow it to be more nimble against enemies and make better decisions regarding how it maneuvers on the battlefield or deceives adversaries.

“All of this comes back to being able to gain positions of advantage, both tactically and operationally, to gain the benefits of employing those assets, whether it’s conduct electronic warfare in an attack mode or being able to see yourself so you can take actions to protect yourself and your formations. Those actions could be passive camouflage or they could be active deception measures,” Evans said.

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The government requires non-developmental counter-unmanned aerial systems to be delivered to the Communications-Electronics Command’s Integrated Logistics Support Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, per the notice.

“The intent of this Sources Sought is to assess the availability of vendors and pricing” to provide 4,145 counter-UAS systems to meet the requirement, officials wrote.

The Army is eyeing devices that can detect, track and identify small drones in the Group 1, 2 and 3 categories of UAS and allow operators to “tag” them as friendly or foe.

Officials are looking for technology that can provide real-time classification of drone threats operating in the ISM frequency spectrum and display critical information about them.

More specifically, they want a soldier-portable capability that offers threat detection with 2-plus mile range; handheld display unit with network connected and offline map display; ability to create a user-defined “tripwire” drone warning area on a map display to alert users to incursions; show threat information such as speed and altitude with geolocation accuracy of 10-20 meters; and identify the position of the “initiator,” or remote controller, among other desired characteristics.

Officials noted that the non-developmental or commercial systems must be exportable to Taiwan and cannot be made in China.

Pentagon officials are concerned that China’s military forces might try to invade Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing aims to bring under Chinese Communist Party control. In recent years, the People’s Liberation Army has been conducting large-scale military activities in the region that some observers believe could be a portent for a future attack.

For decades, the United States has provided military equipment to Taiwan, but some U.S. officials feel a greater sense of urgency now as China beefs up its military capabilities.

The U.S. military is also investing in a wide variety of new counter-drone technologies to protect its own forces around the world. Notably, counter-UAS is one of the focus areas of the Army’s transforming-in-contact initiative.

Industry responses to the sources sought notice are due June 4.

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In a press release and conversations over email, officials unveiled a new prize challenge for low-cost sensing technologies to enhance counter unmanned aerial systems and — in partnership with the Joint Counter-small UAS Office — a new solicitation for “low-collateral defeat options” that can be quickly integrated into existing C-sUAS programs of record across the joint force via the Replicator initiative.

“DIU’s low-cost sensing prize challenge combined with the LCD [solicitation] are a part of the overall strategic push to get after the toughest challenges and most pressing C-UAS problems identified by the warfighter,” David Payne, the unit’s C-UAS program manager, told DefenseScoop.

The new announcement marks the latest move associated with the Defense Department’s high-stakes — but hush-hush — Replicator effort. 

DOD leadership under the Biden administration established Replicator in August 2023 as a key military technology and procurement modernization initiative. At the time, it was billed as a strategic campaign to confront China’s massive, ongoing military buildup by incentivizing U.S. industrial production capacity and the DOD’s adoption of advanced warfare technologies en masse — through replicable processes — at a much faster pace than has been achieved before.

Tranches within the first capability focus area, Replicator-1, broadly encompass the purchase and making of loitering munitions and other technologies associated with all-domain autonomous systems. In September 2024, Pentagon officials revealed plans to prioritize the high-volume production of C-UAS capabilities through Replicator-2.

In DIU’s press release, officials wrote that Replicator aims to “deliver strategic capability and to build new innovative muscle for” DOD, and that the forthcoming solicitation aligns with the Trump administration’s recent executive order entitled “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Industrial Base.” 

The solicitation will be open for submissions from industry through May 16. 

Officials also noted that the call for LCD capabilities is envisioned to supply the military with the “most effective defeat options” for increasingly complex and custom-built drones — and also “help to minimize risk to friendly forces, civilians, and infrastructure in the homeland and abroad.”

“North America faces a variety of non-traditional threats, and key among these is the use of small uncrewed aircraft systems operating near installations and critical infrastructure — addressing these threats is a top priority and essential task,” NorthCom Commander Gen. Gregory Guillot said in the press release. “Partnering with DIU to employ low-collateral defeat capabilities is one example of how we are developing the forward-looking capabilities and policies necessary to ensure a seamless and well-coordinated defensive enterprise.”

The call for capabilities will also build on other ongoing DOD technology-enabling efforts, including collaborative work with the United Kingdom.

A DIU spokesperson told DefenseScoop that this is the first time the unit launched a bilateral commercial solutions opening where the U.K. government’s Ministry of Defence was involved from the start. They also confirmed that this effort “is very much part of the new U.K. Defence Innovation organization that will officially be stood up in July.” 

“This is both nations leveraging the commercial sector to develop novel technology to solve a defense requirement,” the spokesperson said.

Regarding the separate prize challenge that DIU is also posting Monday, the official said that it seeks “to enhance the DOD’s [C-UAS] capabilities while addressing cost and scalability limitations associated with traditional radars, optical sensors, and radio frequency detection systems.”

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In an April 30 memo to the secretary of the Army, Hegseth ordered a vast set of alterations to the service aimed at building a leaner and more lethal force that prioritizes defending the homeland and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.

The administration has made homeland defense — to include securing the southern border and building the “Golden Dome” missile defense system — as well as deterring China, top priorities. The latter includes shifting resources to the Pacific at the potential expense of other theaters, according to press reports. 

Some of the changes pushed by Hegseth in his directive — such as consolidated budget lines in unmanned systems, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare, force structure changes and expanded use of other transaction agreements — are already being pursued.

The memo, however, directs much deeper change to include consolidating certain headquarters elements and changes to how the Army contracts, some of which were reported earlier this week by Breaking Defense.

“[T]he Army must prioritize investments in accordance with the Administration’s strategy, ensuring existing resources are prioritized to improve long-range precision fires, air and missile defense including through the Golden Dome for America, cyber, electronic warfare, and counter-space capabilities,” Hegseth wrote. “I am directing the Secretary of the Army to implement a comprehensive transformation strategy, streamline its force structure, eliminate wasteful spending, reform the acquisition process, modernize inefficient defense contracts, and overcome parochial interests to rebuild our Army, restore the warrior ethos, and reestablish deterrence.”

Among some of the biggest changes, the memo directs the secretary of the Army to downsize or close redundant headquarters. That includes merging Army Futures Command — responsible for developing requirements and experimentation for future capabilities — and Training and Doctrine Command, both four-star organizations, and merging four-star headquarters Forces Command with Army North and Army South into a single headquarters focused on homeland defense.

It also calls for restructuring the Army’s sustainment organizations to realign elements within the four-star Army Materiel Command including the integration of Joint Munitions Command and Army Sustainment Command to optimize operational efficiency.

Other force structure changes Hegseth called for include merging headquarters of organizations to generate combat power capable of synchronizing kinetic and non-kinetic effects, spaced-based capabilities and unmanned systems, reducing and restructuring manned attack helicopter formations, and augmenting the force with drone swarms and divesting of “outdated” formations, such as select armor and aviation units across the total Army, though those select units were not named in the directive.

Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told reporters later Thursday that the Army is converting some armor brigade combat teams in the National Guard to mobile brigade combat teams, which he said will make them much more nimble for the missions that they need to do, whether it’s stateside or abroad.

Some initiatives require fielding certain capabilities or meeting other objectives by a set time — mostly either by 2026 or 2027 — such as achieving “electromagnetic and air-littoral dominance by 2027.”

The Army must field unmanned systems and ground- and air-launched effects in every division and extend advanced manufacturing such as 3D printing to operational units by 2026. The service must also improve counter-drone systems and integrate capabilities into platoons by 2026 and companies by 2027, and enable AI-driven command and control at theater, corps and division headquarters by 2027, according to Hegseth.

On the procurement side, the memo directs ending procurement of obsolete systems as well as canceling or scaling back ineffective or redundant programs such as manned aircraft, excess ground and outdated drones, eliminating “wasteful” contracts and “excess” travel funding and expanding multi-year procurement agreements when it’s cost-effective.

“What we’ve learned in the last couple of years in the conflict in Ukraine is that the old way of doing war will no longer suffice,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said Thursday morning in an appearance on Fox and Friends alongside George.

“Under the leadership for President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth, they basically have empowered the United States Army to go make the hard decisions and the hard changes to reallocate our dollars to best position our soldiers to be the most lethal that they can be,” Driscoll said. “These are hard decisions. These are legacy systems that have been around for a long time. There’s a lot of momentum. There’s a lot of lobbyists around them. but with the leadership of those gentlemen and our chain of command, we have been empowered to go do what’s right.”

George noted that there isn’t necessarily a problem with innovation as soldiers have been innovating the last few years, particularly under one of his keystone efforts dubbed transforming-in-contact since early 2024. The initiative aims to speed up how the Army buys capabilities and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

Three brigades transformed into either mobile or light brigade combat teams over the last year as part of transformating-in-contact 1.0. Now, the service is pushing the initiative to the next level and focusing on armor formations and divisions as a whole, to include enabling units, National Guard units and multi-domain task forces, as well as technologies such as autonomy.

“We don’t have a challenge with the innovation. The innovation’s happening down with our soldiers. We’re changing formations right now,” George said alongside Driscoll. “We had an exercise [where] we had more than 200 drones in a brigade combat team. We’re watching what’s happening. We know we need to change and … we just can’t go fast enough, we got to speed that change.”

George was referencing the last transforming-in-contact brigade, 3^rd Brigade, 10^th Mountain Division’s culminating exercise in January where they used more drones than had ever previously been used.

Regarding the change to formations, the Army’s number two officer last week said the service is planning to approve force design updates on what those mobile and light brigades will look like going forward based on the transforming-in-contact effort. Those changes are expected to be made soon and released in October.

Officials have stressed more experimentation is to come as they don’t necessarily know the right mix of certain capabilities such as drones at echelon. More experimentation is needed to better understand what forces might need in the future.

This story has been updated with comments from Chief of Staff Randy George regarding armored units being converted.

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