Army Expands Use of Disposable One-Way Drones

There’s a revolution happening in the U.S. military. Low-cost, “expendable” drones that fly into a conflict zone and, by design, don’t come back.

At a recent military exercise in Germany, known as Exercise Saber Junction, Army soldiers launched approximately 1,900 attack drones, with more than 1,000 considered disposable or expendable.

An expendable drone is another way of saying one-way drones or kamikaze drones or disposable drones, retired Marine intelligence officer and strategic military risk expert Hal Kempfer said in an interview with Military.com. Basically, they go in there, they do the mission, and they don’t come back.

Germany Training Exercise Uses ‘One-Way’ Drones

The Army’s shift toward using low-cost, one-way drones has been driven in recent years by its Drone Dominance Program, which has a goal of equipping soldiers in remote locations with enoughautonomous systemsto make them expendable.Exercise Saber Junction, the annual multinational military training exercise led by U.S. Army Europe and Africa, was used as a test site by the 7th Army Training Command in Germany.

There, Army soldiers used drones in different combat scenarios against counter-drone systems and other electronic warfare. Army officials said challenging environments were replicated to give soldiers a more realistic experience, and that one-way drones were treated like ammunition, immediately disposable.

“Of the roughly 2,000 drones used during the exercise, 1,000 were consumable,” Brig. Gen. Terry Tillis, head of the 7th Army Training Command, said in a roundtable discussion with overseas reporters last week. “The soldiers were using them like ammunition,”Kempfer said. That’s a different mindset for the U.S. military, which has historically pumped billions of dollars into long-term equipment procurement that can be reused.

“If you look at it as an aircraft procurement thing, it goes through this whole process, a very bureaucratically cumbersome process, which often ends up with these extremely expensive systems with huge cost overruns,” Kempfer said. “And by the time they get them out the door, the technology, in some cases, has literally passed them by.”

Disposable Drone Use Prevalent in Ukraine

Kempfer said it’s a lesson learned in real-time with the war in Ukraine and other recent conflicts in the Middle East. Since last fall, the Pentagon said the Iran-backed Houthi militia group has targeted commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, using aerial vehicles, uncrewed surface vessels and cruise missiles to attack U.S. ships as well as on the ground installations in the region.

“Ukraine is the laboratory for robotic and autonomous warfare. Some of the stuff they’re doing in Ukraine is just amazing,” Kempfer said. “Just the other day, the Army did an airborne operation where larger drones carried smaller combat drones into conflict zones, and those were one-way drones designed to go in there, kill people, blow things up, and not survive.”

Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, acting commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa, also told reporters at last week’s roundtable that the Army’s use of disposable drones will only expand.

He said other countries like the United Kingdom, Japan and South Korea are developing their own disposable drone programs as well.

“Those drone numbers continue to increase in every rotation, and we will continue to increase them in future rotations,” Norrie said. “These drones are now a part of our basics of being able to survive and integrate into protection plans, using them to sense further and strike faster.”

The result, Kempfer said, can be calculated in dollars and the saving of human lives.

“If you’re spending $300,000 on a drone, then yeah, it better be a reusable drone. But if you’re spending, you know, a few thousand dollars on a drone, then it’s probably because you’re not planning on getting that drone back,” he explained. “The cost of building these drones is really not that high, especially when you consider the limited risk of human life. And that’s the whole idea of drones. You’re trying to avoid putting humans in harm’s way.”