U.S. Marines Take a Crash Course in Drone Warfare

“Bomb on target. One by APRS. Four-meter HOB. Thirty-second SST.” “Roger sending.” It’s the tiny weapon seen in conflicts around the world. “Attaching warhead. Inserting cap.” “Flipping drone.” “Spinning props.” You may not see it coming, but you’ll hear it. And by then, it’s already too late. “Contact. I got southeast-facing window. Request permission to engage.” So this is a first-person-view attack drone, essentially a modified quadcopter. And these Marines have just had three weeks of training to get ready to get this thing into combat. F.P.V.s are designed to follow a moving target and bomb it with a push of a button. This seemingly simple tech has transformed, and even defined, modern warfare. “The threats we face today from hostile drones grow by the day.” Last summer, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered combat units across the military to rapidly train on and deploy small, lethal drones like the ones seen in Ukraine and the Middle East. Now the Marine Corps is racing to train and certify hundreds of pilots and get F.P.V. drones into every unit. It’ll be the first time Marines will have attack drone capabilities. “The first time I’ve ever touched or operated an F.P.V. drone was through this course. Prior to that, I had no experience whatsoever with it.” Corporal Noah Player is part of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. He and his fellow Marines could be deployed any day now, and they’ll be expected to use drones like this in combat. “This is the generation of the video games, a controller in your hand and a headset on your eyes.” Pilots see exactly what the drone sees through a headset and guide it to a target with a controller. “I think the most gut-wrenching feeling for me, though, is being able to see the faces and the people before they get hit with a F.P.V. So yeah, it’s scary.” “Killing someone with one of these, if I don’t do it to them, they’re going to do it to my boys.” Unlike America’s Gray Eagle and Reaper drones, which are the size of a school bus and cost millions to make, F.P.V.s are small, cheap and extremely precise. “If we were going to take a small flying aircraft and put it in the air, all we could do was look at things. So intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. What we did not have was a kinetic asset, and we did not have an asset that was cheap enough where it did not have to be recovered.” Russia and Iran have been refining this technology in real combat for years. Now, Marines like Noah are being asked to master these capabilities in weeks. “I think because we want to make sure that the way we implement and use F.P.V. drones is the most effective, it makes us a lethal competitor.” “Are we moving fast enough? No. But I don’t think you can ever move fast enough. What we’re doing right now is taking steps to make sure that when we do meet our adversaries on the battlefield, we’re employing better systems more effectively, and we are able to shoot, move and communicate better than the enemy.” The U.S. is also behind on manufacturing. China and Russia are capable of producing millions of F.P.V. drones per year. By comparison, the Department of Defense goal is to field tens of thousands of them by the end of 2026. “Is that enough to combat the millions that potential adversaries might have?” “If you gave the Marine Corps millions of drones, all except thousands of them would be sitting on a shelf somewhere, because there’s not enough Marines to field them. The more important thing is how do we backfill those numbers when they’re reduced because they’re employed?” For years, the Pentagon acknowledged it needed to take drone warfare more seriously, but only recently began making them at scale. “What makes you so confident that if you were to deploy tomorrow, that you’d be ready to the task, that you’d be up to the challenge?” “Experience is experience, and nothing can take away experience. But with what little time that we’ve had and the amount of effort and determination that we have, I think puts us head to head.”