In the waning days of Florida’s September heat, teams with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force met for the military’s first organized “drone crucible,” a five-day event that pitted the services’ top remote pilots against each other.

Teams came from both special operations and conventional forces, including the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and Aviation Center of Excellence, Navy SEALs, Air Force explosive ordnance disposal troops and the Marine Corps’ new attack drone team. Each team brought their own unmanned systems and training to face scenarios that included chasing convoys and close quarters combat missions where drones cleared buildings before human troops killed a simulated threat inside.

Originally conceived as a competition, civilian organizers approached this first crucible as a stepping stone for future contests because of a “significant disparity between service maturity” on tactics and employment, according to a summary from the organization that headed up the event.

While no service claimed the crucible’s first top throne, teams took home individual accolades. They also traded notes and identified shortfalls — crucial feedback for the military as it rushes to build America’s drone repertoire. 

Rather than run a formal competition, said Nathan Ecelbarger, a Marine veteran and president of the United States National Drone Association, the event’s goal was to identify issues and promote creativity on how the military thinks about drones.

“We can’t afford to waste any more fucking time on traditional acquisition cycles. Satellites and submarines, fine, go ahead and take five years to establish a program of record,” Ecelbarger told Task & Purpose. “Drone warfare is here now.” 

The teams competed in six different scenarios: close quarters combat; striking a moving enemy vehicle convoy moving more than 40 miles per hour; destroying or disabling simulated enemy intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance assets; night operations; a long-range strike that saw teams locating, tracking and engaging a target more than seven miles away; and finally, a joint live strike where the teams joined together to blow up a target. 

Ecelbarger said the USNDA will hold crucible events every 90 days. “We will continue providing a venue for Rangers, SEALS, and Marines to defeat each other, so we can collectively learn from each other, before we send them all into the next real-world conflict.” 

The Russia-Ukraine drone era

The competition marks a significant notch as the U.S. rushes to catch up with its own tactics, procurement and training for drones, which have been at the center of the Russia-Ukraine war. America still vastly trails rivals Russia and China in the drone business.

In July, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a three-point memo on “unleashing U.S. military drone dominance” to urge manufacturing, technological advancement, and training that tasked senior officers to cut through red tape and “risk-aversion.” 

Ecelbarger said that the Drone Crucible hit all of those wickets. But the U.S. military’s drone effort still faces challenges.

In an executive summary shared with Task & Purpose, Ecelbarger said that the crucible was designed as a “crawl” stage for future competitions and that “teams were provided with qualitative feedback and awarded performance certificates based on their individual teams’ contributions, highlighting areas of excellence.”

He wrote that the services still “face barriers” in acquisition and “bureaucratic resistance” when it comes to range approval policies necessary to get troops using drones on a more regular basis, for example. He also said that conventional forces lack the authority that units within the Joint Special Operations Command have, but JSOC units “struggle to match the funding” allocated to conventional forces to get drone systems to scale.

The event produced significant feedback directly from drone operators, Ecelbarger wrote. Specifically, operators reported the need for official senior leader education to better understand drone technology and implementation, leaning on experience gained by home-grown drone users popping up around the force. 

Other feedback included the need for organizational restructuring to improve joint training and an urgent need for the Pentagon to invest in scaling “as many cheap systems as possible” that can be “lost or destroyed without fear of punitive action or depleting a unit’s operation inventory,” according to the memo.

“We want space to actually innovate and do drone shit,” as one drone operator said, according to Ecelbarger’s memo.  

The Marine Corps Attack Drone Team, which was founded in January, took home the Commander’s Intent Award for Conventional Forces Drone Dominance, meaning that it demonstrated technical and tactical competency through established doctrine “that allows drone capabilities to scale across the Marine Corps and joint force.”

The 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment team took home an award under the special operations category for using proven tactics ready to be adopted by other specialized units.

Operators from Naval Special Warfare Seal Team One and Two earned an adaptability award, having successfully used these systems across each crucible scenario “despite being significantly underequipped with drone capabilities needed to scale across the individual SEAL Teams,” according to Ecelbarger’s memo.

The Air Force EOD team won the innovation award for using a home-made FPV drone with a “bomblet dropper” to hit multiple moving targets and during a long-range strike mission. The Army’s Aviation Center of Excellence was awarded the “Drone Dominance Overachiever Award” for successfully conducting each event despite how recent its official drone team was founded, the summary said.

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