\n<\/p>\n
\u201cBomb on target. One by APRS. Four-meter HOB. Thirty-second SST.\u201d \u201cRoger sending.\u201d It\u2019s the tiny weapon seen in conflicts around the world. \u201cAttaching warhead. Inserting cap.\u201d \u201cFlipping drone.\u201d \u201cSpinning props.\u201d You may not see it coming, but you\u2019ll hear it. And by then, it\u2019s already too late. \u201cContact. I got southeast-facing window. Request permission to engage.\u201d 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. \u201cThe threats we face today from hostile drones grow by the day.\u201d 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\u2019ll be the first time Marines will have attack drone capabilities. \u201cThe first time I\u2019ve ever touched or operated an F.P.V. drone was through this course. Prior to that, I had no experience whatsoever with it.\u201d Corporal Noah Player is part of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. He and his fellow Marines could be deployed any day now, and they\u2019ll be expected to use drones like this in combat. \u201cThis is the generation of the video games, a controller in your hand and a headset on your eyes.\u201d Pilots see exactly what the drone sees through a headset and guide it to a target with a controller. \u201cI 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\u2019s scary.\u201d \u201cKilling someone with one of these, if I don\u2019t do it to them, they\u2019re going to do it to my boys.\u201d Unlike America\u2019s 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. \u201cIf 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.\u201d 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. \u201cI 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.\u201d \u201cAre we moving fast enough? No. But I don\u2019t think you can ever move fast enough. What we\u2019re doing right now is taking steps to make sure that when we do meet our adversaries on the battlefield, we\u2019re employing better systems more effectively, and we are able to shoot, move and communicate better than the enemy.\u201d 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. \u201cIs that enough to combat the millions that potential adversaries might have?\u201d \u201cIf you gave the Marine Corps millions of drones, all except thousands of them would be sitting on a shelf somewhere, because there\u2019s not enough Marines to field them. The more important thing is how do we backfill those numbers when they\u2019re reduced because they\u2019re employed?\u201d For years, the Pentagon acknowledged it needed to take drone warfare more seriously, but only recently began making them at scale. \u201cWhat makes you so confident that if you were to deploy tomorrow, that you\u2019d be ready to the task, that you\u2019d be up to the challenge?\u201d \u201cExperience is experience, and nothing can take away experience. But with what little time that we\u2019ve had and the amount of effort and determination that we have, I think puts us head to head.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cBomb on target. One by APRS. Four-meter HOB. Thirty-second SST.\u201d \u201cRoger sending.\u201d It\u2019s the tiny weapon seen in conflicts around the world. \u201cAttaching warhead. Inserting cap.\u201d \u201cFlipping drone.\u201d \u201cSpinning props.\u201d You may not see it coming, but you\u2019ll hear it. And by then, it\u2019s already too late. \u201cContact. I got southeast-facing window. Request permission to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1872,3244,24480,811,14103],"class_list":{"0":"post-49273","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-crash","9":"tag-drone","10":"tag-marines","11":"tag-u-s","12":"tag-warfare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/49274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}