The Army's drone fielding has outrun its pilot training, the program's director says

The two tranches Merkl described add to 40,000 drones, against a program committed to buying at least 200,000 through 2027 on a $1 billion investment ^[6]. That puts about a fifth of the total buy on hand or in transit ^[17], and it implies an average of no more than $5,000 a drone ^[18]. Four fifths of the hardware is still to come.

Merkl placed the trained-operator line one echelon above where the Army wants it. "Right now, if you look across the force, you have that capability in every platoon. We still have a little bit of work to do in terms of getting qualified pilots down to the squad level," he said ^[5]. On hardware he was flatter: the drones now arriving are "enough absolutely to get them down to every squad level" ^[3]. Merkl did not say how many qualified pilots squad-level coverage requires ^[20].

The dissemination question got harder last month, when news broke that the Army was phasing out the 173rd Airborne Brigade's specialized drone unit ^[13]. Army officials say that experimental role was always temporary, and that the plan was for formations across the Army to cultivate drone skills instead of leaning on one unit ^[14]. Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, acting commander of US Army Europe and Africa, said the unit's job was "to provide lessons, to put them into really realistic, tough, difficult training scenarios, and then provide feedback so that the institutional Army could make decisions about doctrine and organization and acquisitions" ^[15]. "We got a tremendous amount of data and feedback from the rotation that we're providing to the Army," he said ^[16].

Buy the hardware, stand up the courses. The courses already exist: drone exposure in basic training, the Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course, and programs built around flying specific models ^[9]. But the Army plans to field thousands of low-cost, one-way attack drones by next fiscal year and is still selecting vendors through the evaluations it calls Gauntlets ^[8]. Every course tied to a particular airframe has to be rewritten when the selected mix changes.

What the schools have going for them is the intake. Observations from Army drone courses have identified skills soldiers already bring, from flying drones as a hobby and playing video games to the engineering know-how to build and modify them ^[11]. The three-week crash course launched last year at Fort Rucker, Alabama, taught piloting basics while also having students explore how to build and 3D print parts; its pilot class was described as a "catch-up" to close the US gap on drones ^[10].

Delivery and training are not running on the same schedule. The delivery calendar is published and short. The training side has a date only in the sense that the Army says it prioritizes soldier feedback and takeaways from the war in Ukraine, including from US soldiers who trained with Ukrainians ^[12]. As Merkl put it, "Where we still have some work to do, candidly, is getting everybody trained at the appropriate level" ^[4].