US Army Drone Supply Outpaces Its Trained Operators

The U.S. Army has enough small one-way attack drones to equip every squad, but training soldiers to fly them remains a gap, according to Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army's Drone Dominance director. 

Launched in 2025, the Pentagon's Drone Dominance program set a fiscal 2026 deadline for equipping all squads. With that date close, the Army is prioritizing training, especially for operating where adversaries jam or disrupt signals. It is running working groups internally and with partners such as the FAA, and soldiers trained with Ukrainian and NATO forces at the Saber Junction exercise in Germany.

Merkl believes the key lesson from the exercise was that handling signal interference should become as routine for soldiers as reading a map. Units have accepted 12,080 drones from the program's first Gauntlet round.

Read the full story at Breaking Defense.