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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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 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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The proposed funding is part of a broader $150 billion reconciliation bill unveiled Sunday that’s intended to boost spending on U.S. military capabilities and border security.

“This legislation represents a generational upgrade for our nation’s defense capabilities, including historic investments in new technology,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said in a statement. “This is about building the future of American defense, achieving peace through strength, and ultimately deterring war.”

If the bill is passed, sizable investments would go toward kamikaze drones — also known as one-way attack drones or loitering munitions — that are designed to destroy their targets by crashing into them. U.S. Army and Marine Corps leaders are gung-ho about acquiring these types of capabilities after watching their heavy use in Ukraine and other conflicts.

The legislation would pump $1 billion into expanding the kamikaze drone industrial base, provide $50 million to accelerate delivery of one-way attack unmanned aerial systems with “advanced autonomy,” and allocate $145 million for the development of AI capabilities to enable one-way attack UAS and naval systems.

An additional $500 million would be allotted to “prevent delays” in the delivery of “attritable autonomous military capabilities.” The bill did not identify specific systems that lawmakers are concerned about facing potential delays.

The legislation also includes $1.1 billion in funding to expand the small UAS industrial base.

More money would go toward uncrewed maritime platforms, including about $1.8 billion for expansion of medium unmanned surface vessel production; $1.5 billion for expansion of small USV production; $1.3 billion for expansion of unmanned underwater vehicle production; $250 million for the development, production and integration of wave-powered UUVs; and $188 million for the development and testing of “maritime robotic autonomous systems and enabling technologies.”

Another $174 million would be invested in the development of a Test Resource Management Center robotic autonomous systems “proving ground.”

Pentagon officials are also keen on acquiring new capabilities to defeat adversaries’ drones, and the reconciliation bill includes funding for those types of tools.

The legislation would allocate $250 million for the development, production and integration of land-based counter-UAS programs; $200 million for the development, production and integration of ship-based counter-drone programs; and $350 million for the development, production and integration of non-kinetic counter-UAS programs. The term “non-kinetic” in U.S. military parlance generally refers to weapons that aren’t projectiles or missiles, such as electronic warfare, directed energy, or cyber capabilities.

“This legislation is a historic investment of $150 billion to restore America’s military capabilities and strengthen our national defense,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said in a statement. “Our military’s resources have declined over the years … Our defense industrial base has weakened. America’s deterrence is failing and without a generational investment in our national defense, we will lose the ability to defeat our adversaries.”

The HASC is slated to hold a markup session for the reconciliation bill Tuesday. The legislation will subsequently be sent to the House Budget Committee.

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The SECNAV is the top civilian responsible for leading the Department of the Navy, which also includes the Marine Corps. Phelan, a businessman and co-founder of MSD Capital, was nominated for the post by President Donald Trump.

Ahead of his confirmation hearing last month, Phelan told lawmakers that he planned to push for more investment in uncrewed systems and enabler technologies — such as autonomy, mission systems and communications — for manned-unmanned teaming by the Navy and jointly with the other military services.

He’s coming into the job as the sea service is pursuing a “hybrid fleet” and trying to accelerate the fielding of robotic platforms to counter China, including via Project 33. The Marine Corps is also pursuing collaborative combat aircraft via its Penetrating Affordable Autonomous Collaborative Killer-Portfolio (PAACK-P) program, as well as loitering munitions.

Phelan also noted the need for a variety of counter-drone tools, informed by recent Navy efforts to thwart attacks by the Houthis and protect military and commercial vessels in the Red Sea. Some defense officials have said the military needs cheaper options for shooting down inexpensive adversary unmanned aerial systems.

“The Red Sea engagements provided valuable lessons. While cost exchange ratios are a useful metric against low-cost threats, they don’t encompass the full complexity of naval warfare. I fully support a Captain utilizing the most effective means available to eliminate threats and protect their multibillion-dollar ship and crew. However, we must provide them with a wider variety of reliable options beyond their current limited and costly solutions. If confirmed, I will prioritize expanding development of layered ship defense capabilities, including guns, directed energy, loitering munitions, and other innovative technologies,” Phelan wrote in response to advance policy questions from senators.

The Marines are also gung-ho about counter-drone tech, having recently awarded a $642 million contract to Anduril to deliver, install and sustain a family of systems to protect its installations from small UAS.

Phelan also weighed in on digital threats that the department is confronting expressing his view that the top cyber challenges facing the Navy are securing defense critical infrastructure and weapon systems, increasing cyber force readiness and executing critical modernization efforts.

“Removing legacy information technology, modernizing cryptography, implementing zero trust, and hardening classified networks all contribute to modernizing the Department of the Navy. Importantly, the readiness of our military and civilian workforce is critical for achieving our priorities in cyberspace. It is my understanding that the Navy and Marine Corps have made notable progress in strengthening cybersecurity and resiliency in operational technology environments and in improving the readiness of their personnel in the Cyber Mission Force [overseen by U.S. Cyber Command],” he wrote.

“Additionally, the Department of the Navy recently delivered the first fully validated implementation of a true Zero Trust architecture in the Department of Defense. If confirmed, I will expect the [Navy’s principal cyber adviser] to work closely with the Chief Information Officer and Navy and Marine Corps stakeholders to drive tangible outcomes in these areas,” he told lawmakers.

The department is also placing greater emphasis on information warfare, which includes intelligence, electronic warfare, cyber, cryptology and networks, among other areas.

Phelan told senators that, if confirmed, he would request a detailed briefing on the Navy’s “information dominance” capabilities and determine resourcing, workforce and innovation priorities to integrate into the joint force’s modernization efforts.

“If confirmed, I will empower the Naval Information Warfare Community to recruit, retain and promote the most skilled and qualified Sailors to train and conduct integrated fires to effectively deter and combat threats to our Nation. These actions align to the Department of the Navy Cyber Strategy which calls for effective sequencing and synchronization of non-kinetic effects to generate decisive advantages,” he wrote.

Phelan — who has no previous military experience — will take the helm of the Navy as the Pentagon is in the midst of DOGE reviews, hiring freezes and efforts to reduce the DOD’s civilian workforce by more than 50,000 people. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently issued a memo giving service secretaries the authority to request and authorize certain exemptions to the civilian hiring freeze. Last week, the department released another memo with a list of more positions that are eligible for exemptions.

“Congratulations John Phelan on being Confirmed as the 79th Secretary of the Navy!” Hegseth wrote in a post on X Monday evening. “Looking forward to supporting our warfighters together.”

In a statement, Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) President and CEO Eric Fanning said the new SECNAV’s “business acumen will infuse the Navy with a strategic approach to expanding our fleet to meet deterrence needs across the world, especially in the Indo-Pacific,” adding that his “commitment to readiness, effectiveness, and efficiency aligns seamlessly with our industry’s priorities. We look forward to collaborating with Secretary Phelan to ensure our Sailors are equipped with the finest equipment in the world.”

Phelan’s confirmation marks the latest success by the Trump administration in filling high-level posts at the Pentagon.

On March 14, the Senate confirmed Stephen Feinberg as deputy secretary of defense to serve as the Pentagon’s No. 2 under Hegseth. Trump’s pick for Army secretary, Daniel Driscoll, was confirmed in late February. And earlier this month, Katie Arrington was appointed acting Pentagon CIO.

However, other nominees for high-level Pentagon jobs have yet to be confirmed, such as Lt. Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Troy Meink as Air Force secretary, among others.

It’s also uncertain who will be the next chief of naval operations working alongside Phelan to lead the sea service. Last month, Trump fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti as CNO and hasn’t nominated a replacement. In the meantime, Adm. James Kilby, vice chief of naval operations, is performing the duties of CNO.

Other key nominations for senior positions that have yet to be confirmed include Michael Duffey to be undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer; Emil Michael to be undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, a role tasked with fostering next-generation military capabilities and overseeing critical technology areas; and Elbridge “Bridge” Colby to be undersecretary of defense for policy, among others. A confirmation hearing for Meink, Michael and Duffey is scheduled for Thursday.

Updated on March 25, 2025, at 9:50 AM: This story has been updated to include comments from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and AIA President and CEO Eric Fanning.

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Commanders at U.S. military bases are already seeing large numbers of incursions by small unmanned aerial systems. And those types of threats are expected to increase.

“We must continue to capture the lessons being learned in blood on active battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East. We should pay special attention to the increasing importance of … the proliferation and effectiveness of drones,” Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith wrote in planning guidance issued last year. “We will continue to experiment with and invest in burgeoning capabilities that are defining the modern battlefield such as Ground Based Air Defenses, including Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems.”

In early 2024, the Corps released a solicitation for Installation-Counter Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (I-CsUAS). A few days ago, the Pentagon announced that Anduril beat out nine other offerors and snagged an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth a whopping $642 million to deliver, install and sustain a family of systems between now and March 2035.

“What they’ve selected here is not just a capability that is going to set them up for a future, but something that can deliver real capability to them today,” Kyle Erickson, general manager of air defense at Anduril, told DefenseScoop in an interview Thursday. “Our family of systems is deployed at scale with multiple services at multiple locations around the world. Has been in service for many years. It is proven, it is real, it’s in production. And so they’re picking something that is going to deliver value to them immediately.”

The contractor expects to field capabilities this year.

Erickson noted that the company has already provided a similar capability to U.S. Special Operations Command.

The family of systems that the Marine Corps will get under the new contract includes a variety of sensors and weapons to detect, identify, track and take down small UAS.

Erickson noted that Anduril will provide “an end-to-end capability” across the entire “kill chain,” to include all the fielding and sustainment support services.

“I can’t get into what we’re specifically going to provide for a specific installation in a given circumstance. Part of that is just due to the sensitivity of it, but partially also because different installations will have different priorities or threat profiles. And so I can’t talk about the specific case, but in the general case, you know the Marine Corps here is going to have access to our full family of systems, which includes multi-sensor detect, track, ID capability, including the radar and narrow-field-of-view infrared imaging capability in our Long Range Sensor Towers, the wide area infrared sensing with persistence in the Wisp sensor, as well as radio frequency sensing with the Pulsar capability and multiple defeat options, including low-collateral interceptors, like our Anvil interceptor, as well as the [electronic warfare] capabilities of the Pulsar,” he said. “So across that family of systems, you get multiple sensing modalities, multiple defeat or deter options to deploy flexibly depending on the threat profile or the authorities in a given situation.”

The company’s AI-enabled software platform, called Lattice, will be the centerpiece of the drone-killing architecture.

“Lattice is the software that stitches all this capability together. So it’s providing that command-and-control interface to the end users or operators so that they can command and control all the assets at a given installation from a single pane of glass. It’s also providing the autonomy capabilities on the different products themselves, so providing all the kinds of automated threat identification, sensor fusion, tracking — all the kinds of autonomy capabilities that help our operators to progress through the kill chain much more quickly and reduce the burden on them,” Erickson told DefenseScoop.

Anduril is taking a “software-first” approach to its family of systems, he said, which will facilitate future upgrades to the capabilities as new technologies become available.

Drone threat identification can vary depending on the sensor modality, Erickson noted.

“You might do some track classification based on the kinematics of a radar track, for example, the different characteristics of that track as measured by the radar with something like a narrow-field-of-view optic. Yu can run computer vision algorithms on the imagery and train those over time as you see more data with a radio frequency sensor. As you can imagine, you can do some amount of identification based on the particular signal and the analysis of that signal,” he explained. “And when you have these multiple modalities layered in together, then you have much greater capability of identifying threats.”

While autonomy is a key element of the capability set, Erickson said there is room for a human in the loop, which is important to the Marine Corps.

“The autonomy is really designed to invite the user at key decision points through the kill chain process. So the autonomy is doing a lot of the initial detection, tracking and identification. When a threat is identified, the end user is notified and alerted. They then have an opportunity to make a decision about what to do, whether that’s making a phone call or working through their [standard operating procedures], or even tasking an integrated effector against the threat. So there’s not going to be 100 percent automated, full execution of the kill chain — and that’s very much by design. You know our customers want to have a human operator on the loop for these critical decision points, and that’s a key element in our design approach as well,” he noted.

The $642 million I-CsUAS contract is focused on addressing threats posed by Group 1 and Group 2 drones — which are on the smaller end of the UAS spectrum — but Anduril also has capabilities that can defeat Group 3 systems, Erickson said.

Kamikaze drones, also known as one-way attack drones or loitering munitions, typically fall into the Group 3 category, and they’re a type of weapon that the Marines and the U.S. military writ large are concerned about and want to counter.

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