Using open-source analysis and commentary, a team of volunteers led by a retired lieutenant colonel got to work answering this question.

Two documents emerged out of this informal Marine effort.

One was a detailed 126-page handbook that described a series of scenarios and explained how existing Marine doctrine would apply to such a fight.

The handbook covered everything from how a company leader should write an order — one page, handwritten, no imagery — to drone use, and how each drone would support one unit, with leaders tasking drones in the company order.

It also candidly acknowledged gaps in official Marine Corps guidance on how to hide from enemy drones, how to use anti-tank missiles alongside drones to hunt and destroy the enemy and how to move under artillery fire.

The second document was a brief summary of 10 “lessons for leaders” about fighting on a battlefield like Ukraine.

That five-pager specified what Marine ground forces would need to win in these conditions: drones in every unit and echelon, anti-drone electronic warfare jammers, and, counter to the Corps’ recent decisions on the future shape of the force, a reliance on tanks.

“The tank is not dead, as many have predicted,” the authors wrote, citing Ukraine’s employment of armored vehicles and its desire for more to stand off Russia’s mechanized units.

These documents were combined and published in June on 2ndBn5thMar.com, a website that takes its name from a Camp Pendleton, California, infantry unit, but is unaffiliated with the Corps.

It’s run by Brendan McBreen, who retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2011 and is now a faculty member at Marine Corps Intelligence Schools in Dam Neck, Va.

The site dates to 1998, when McBreen, then attached to 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, was tasked with distributing standard operating procedures being developed to fight and train. When a sergeant suggested posting the document to the “World Wide Web,” McBreen took it upon himself to create a place to host it.

“I didn’t do anything for a couple of years,” McBreen said. “And my wife said, ‘Hey, we’re still paying $9.95 a month to this web hosting company. And so I got on – you know, once every six months, I would look and see how it’s doing. And there were thousands of downloads.”

For those concerned about operational security, McBreen said all material discussed on his site is based on open-source information and doesn’t cover anything classified.

As McBreen’s career progressed, the site traveled with him. From time to time, fellow infantry Marine officers would reach out to share their own best practices for specific tasks, such as 81mm mortar employment.

While official Marine Corps doctrine provided general guidance, McBreen said he noticed a lack of unit-level practices and procedures, creating space for this crowd-sourced infantry network to fill in the gaps.

“Some of it was good,” McBreen said of the informal input he received. “Some of it was average, but all of it was shareable.”

The emergence of drones as a battlefield factor in recent years has created new demand for guidance on how to integrate the technology into the fight and defend against it. In 2020, Marine Capt. Walker Mills co-authored a paper on how units could camouflage themselves to evade aerial surveillance and published it on McBreen’s website.

Now a drone officer, Mills contributed to portions of the new Ukraine documents dealing with drone warfare that were published on 2ndBn5thMar.com.

“The doctrine always lags somewhat,” Mills told Marine Corps Times. “Our standard infantry company and platoon publications are several years old, maybe even a decade old. So, they don’t talk a ton about small tactical [drones].”

McBreen said he’s occasionally noticed spikes in the site’s popularity over the years, notably around 2005 when he published “Night Warrior,” a training guide for nighttime combat. Most of the time, he said, he can’t tell what’s driving a new surge in traffic.

“The tracking stuff would show jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, and then a big spike,” he said, “And you could also tell, although I never knew the origin, that some instructor said at some school, ‘Hey, students, you ought to look at this document.’”

Maj. Zachary Schwartz, who recently served as the operations officer for 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines out of Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California, and is now enrolled in Marine Corps Command and Staff college, said he’s used the site for guidance as an infantry leader at various levels.

While a 1st lieutenant serving as a team leader, Schwartz recalled benefitting from an article about condensing traditional Marine Corps five-paragraph orders into concise verbal instructions.

He’s also employed the practical guidance within the camouflage manual to teach signature management and deception: simple things like habitually using leaves and brush to hide the shape of a helmet. Schwartz was also a contributor to the recently published Ukraine document.

It’s hard to know the exact reach of McBreen’s website, which has typically been shared via word of mouth.

“I would say the infantry community embraces what Brendan McBreen has done,” Schwartz said. “The real pros in our community all know this website. They all know the resources on it, and they all pass it around.”

Though the documents contain candid analysis that sometimes challenges conventional Marine Corps perspectives — such as calling for tanks even as the Corps has divested itself of them to fight lighter — the site’s supporters feel that such informal discussions are what leaders want of their Marines.

“I feel like you hear a lot of leaders say, hey, professional discussion is part of being in the Marine Corps,” Mills said. “You know, leave things better than you found them.”

When McBreen published the Ukraine handbook in June, he got an immediate indicator that the document was popular when a notice from the website hosting service warned that downloads had exceeded the site’s capacity and 2ndBn5thMar.com was in danger of crashing.

“OK,” McBreen recalled saying. “I’ll give you four more dollars a month, or whatever you need.”

That’s the premise behind a $6.8 million research effort headed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that aims to develop technology that could change the voting game for troops stationed far from home and even deployed to remote locations.

Steve Trout, head of government partnerships for DARPA contractor VotingWorks, puts his vision more bluntly: “My goal is there’s a ballot cast from the International Space Station.”

VotingWorks and DARPA held a preview demonstration Feb. 7, with military representatives and state government officials in attendance, to show what a “first-class” military voting experience could look like.

The problem, as presenters outlined it, was clear: For troops and family members, voting looks and feels very different than it does for most Americans. They mail an absentee ballot that may look unlike the one used in their state or local voting region, and won’t get counted until an audit period some time after the projected winners have all been announced.

And that difference in experience and perception directly translates to voting participation: According to information presented by VotingWorks, military voters have an average turnout of 47%, compared to 74% for civilians. Polling data presented underscores the part that voting challenges play in nonparticipation.

Some 54% of surveyed military members who wanted to vote but didn’t said they had trouble requesting an absentee ballot, and another 43% said the ballot never arrived at all. Other reasons for not voting included a too-complicated voting process, difficulty with the mailing system, and trouble accessing their state’s election website.

The technology proposal from VotingWorks would change the game with portable one-stop voting stations, compact enough to fit in a big suitcase, that print a paper ballot just like the one corresponding to a service member’s local election and also generate a label for mailing that mallet to the correct polling center, all the way up until the night of the election.

An end-to-end encrypted electronic version of the ballot is then immediately transmitted to the local election center for counting, while the paper version follows in the mail, allowing the hard copy to be verified within the three-to-four week audit window following an election.

In this scenario, the process is all enabled through the service member’s military common access card, or CAC, which verifies their identity, thereby sidestepping the most challenging problem standing in the way of large-scale electronic voting.

VotingWorks leaders are quick to stress that they’re not trying to develop an internet-based voting system. Nor, they say, are they working to solve civilian absentee voting problems.

“We are explicitly not trying to use military voting as a jumping-off point for broad internet voting,” said Ben Adida, executive director of VotingWorks. “We have aspects of our design that are only going to work for the military, and we’re 100% okay with that.”

While the effort is still in a research phase, company leaders at the end of the year want to present DARPA with a working prototype and open-source design code “so anybody can take it and go from there,” Adida said. While plans are not yet final, limited-scope pilot programs may be rolled out in 2025 to test the usefulness of the technology.

Dan Wallach, program manager for the DARPA Innovation Office, said in 2025, after the close of the 2024 presidential election cycle, will present more opportunities for trial and experimentation.

“You don’t roll out new things in a high turnout, high-stakes election,” he said. “When we’re voting for the dog-catcher, that’s when you try the new stuff.”

The innovation behind the current proposal is a dual-track system in which the voting stations, consisting of a terminal and printers for ballots and mailing labels, are distributed across military bases and deployed environments.

After securely identifying a military voter via their CAC card, the stations dispense a paper ballot, which can be filled out and mailed using the label. Ballots also are scanned electronically, allowing the encrypted votes to be instantly and securely transmitted to polling places and counted with those of local voters.

The military voter’s paper ballot will arrive after the election, but in time to be included in the vote audit, which verifies election results and can take up to four weeks after an election to complete.

To work well, the voting stations will need to be secure enough that theft or breach of a station won’t result in a compromise of ballots or voter data, and able to function with minimal internet connectivity ― while electronic transmission will be necessary to send votes, the stations need to be able to print the right local ballots and mailing labels for any military voter while offline. That’s all in the design specifications, Adida said.

“We’re going to try to do it with the minimum amount of internet and the minimum amount of cell service, sporadically,” Adida said. “Maybe at one base, you don’t have an internet connection, but maybe you can write some USB sticks and get them transported to a base that does have internet.”

Christy McCormick, the chairwoman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, expressed skepticism that the system would work as advertised.

“I was tasked with getting election results back to the Pentagon as part of my job when I was in Iraq, and we couldn’t even use CAC cards,” she said. “So there’s some huge hurdles here in these countries, especially war zones, where you’re not going to have a place to put that machine.”

McCormick, who was stationed in Iraq from 2009–2010 as an elections expert with the Department of Justice, told Military Times after the presentation that she was hopeful about the new project, but aware of the extensive collaboration from federal agencies and the Defense Department that would be needed to make such a proposal successful.

“It’s always worth the attempt,” she said, “And I hope that they can get those issues worked out, that we can enfranchise more of our overseas population.”

Wallach, of DARPA, said a combination of new and maturing technology and the narrow scope of the effort

“There’s been a lot of research on electronic voting and security over the past few decades that this program has drawn on,” Wallach said, adding that the relatively new post-election risk-limiting audit process and advances in encryption all helped to make a better military voting solution practical.

“There are a bunch of things that are very recent,” he said, “And putting them together is what’s novel.”

Now, the Corps is investing millions in a developmental “flying ferry” that purports to solve the same problem.

The Marine Corps Warfighting Lab has signed a nearly $5 million contract to test out hydrofoiling seagliders, which may provide an innovative solution for medical evacuation and resupply in littoral regions.

The contract is with Rhode Island-based Regent, a three-year-old company developing all-electric gliders for defense and commercial use. The company announced in November 2022 it had assembled a defense advisory board of retired general and flag officers, notably including Gen. Robert Neller, the 37th commandant of the Marine Corps.

These seagliders, still in development, represent a boat-aircraft hybrid that has no direct parallel in the commercial or military world. A hydrofoiling base, or small platform that touches the water, allows the body of the glider to stay “airborne” while in motion a short distance above the water’s surface, though not actually in flight. Regent says it has sold 467 of the craft so far to commercial aviation and ferry customers around the world, and has an order backlog totaling nearly $8 billion.

Regent’s current seaglider model ― and the one the Warfighting Lab would be assessing ― is the 12-passenger Viceroy.

The glider can travel up to 180 miles on a single charge, but the company is working to stretch that range outward as battery technology improves, Bill Thalheimer, co-founder and CEO of Regent, told Marine Corps Times in an interview. He theorizes the range could reach 500 miles by the end of the decade.

In light of that expected trajectory, Thalheimer said, the military use case for the gliders in maritime regions like the Indo-Pacific became clear. The novelty of the platform also lends itself to experimentation by entities like the Warfighting Lab.

The Viceroy seaglider initially will be comparable in cost to a small aircraft such as a Cessna Grand Caravan or DHC-6 Twin Otter, he said, although the company expects the cost to come down as more enter production. Those planes cost between $2 and $4 million new.

The yet-to-be-completed fully operational prototype will weigh 15,000 pounds, handle a payload of 3,500 pounds and have a 65-foot wingspan.

Thalheimer said the glider could fill a known gap in the Marines’ high-speed logistics mission in the Pacific while freeing up helicopters and other longer-range assets for different tasks.

The range of Marine Corps experimentation efforts with light and low-cost platforms that can cover coastal distances fast ― perhaps spanning the distance between an expeditionary advanced base in the littorals and a better-equipped medical center in time to provide care to a wounded Marine within the critical Golden Hour ― speaks to the difficulty of the problem. Former Commandant Gen. David Berger said earlier this year that logistics represents the Corps’ greatest current challenge.

The seagliders “address a recognized gap within the U.S. Department of Defense for high-speed, low-cost, low-signature, runway-independent mobility in the littorals and fulfill a range of mission sets including troop and cargo transport, expeditionary advanced base operations, and communications,” Regent said in a released statement.

The news of the new glider development contract coincides with the publication of an article by Marine Corps Capt. Trevor Shimulunas arguing for a similar concept: unmanned, single-use aerial gliders for small unit logistics.

“Glider systems decrease the risk of detection by enemy forces,” Shimulunas writes for U.S. Naval Institute Magazine Proceedings. “Released at a significant standoff distance from the supported unit, gliders could eliminate the risk of audible detection, and their small size and color scheme would decrease risk of visual detection.”

Notably, the kinds of unmanned gliders Shimulunas describes are smaller and less expensive than Regent’s model, and would only carry cargo, not passengers.

The Warfighting Lab, Thalheimer said, will be conducting three separate demonstrations as part of the agreement with Regent: a float demo, a hydrofoil demo and a flight demo.

These initial “barebones” demonstrations, he said, will prove out the aircraft’s abilities to operate through its full operating envelope.

According to Regent’s announcement about the Marine Corps contract, the demonstration period will culminate “in a live technical demonstration of the full-scale prototype during a large-scale exercise hosted by the U.S. Government.” Thalheimer did not provide additional details about this planned exercise, saying those conversations are just beginning. The Marine Corps is not purchasing any seagliders in the contract, he said. The Corps’ investment, he added, will allow for maturation of the technology and validation of the concept. Thalheimer added the company was also pursuing conversations with the Coast Guard, which may have a use for seagliders for maritime patrol.

Marine Corps officials did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Regent and its plans to demonstrate the glider.

In addition to logistics and medevac between and around expeditionary forward bases in the littorals, Thalheimer said the Viceroy could serve as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform or an ad hoc communications network when equipped with the right payload.

“They’re essentially aircraft with unlimited loiter time, because they can land and take off in the water,” he said.

In a statement, Neller highlighted this intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance use case, saying speed and signature management in the littorals was critical.

“REGENT seagliders provide the ability to distribute multiple capabilities in the littorals, including logistics, command and control, and ISR,” he said. “The REGENT seaglider capabilities will create success.”

While the prospect of a manned seaglider without armament or built-in defenses operating in a potentially contested future littoral environment might give many pause, Thalheimer said the company is addressing that concern.

Regent expects to develop a future unmanned and autonomous version of the glider soon, he said, adding that its current control system already is highly automated and adaptation will be made easier due to the simplicity of conducting testing over water rather than in trafficked areas.

The currently planned manned version, though, offers certain advantages over traditional aircraft, Thalheimer said. The complexity of training pilots to fly the glider is much less than with a conventional military aircraft, meaning requirements can be lessened and training length shortened, he said.

“These can be enlisted service men and women who are at the helm of this, driving it like a boat with essentially all the capabilities of an aircraft,” he said.

Now, though, Marine leaders want to bring all of the service’s unmanned systems efforts under one roof in hopes of developing sustainable career pipelines and catching up to the sprint pace of technology development.

The service’s new catch-all term for the technology, “intelligent robotics and autonomous systems,” or IRAS, made its debut in June’s update to Force Design 2030. That document called on deputy commandants to build intelligent robotics and autonomous systems into the forcewide experimentation plan; streamline acquisition of the most rugged and highly demanded unmanned systems; and develop a strategy to “integrate robotics specialties throughout the total force,” among other taskers.

“Marines must fight at machine speed or face defeat at machine speed,” the design document stated, citing the pivotal role of drones in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war in Azerbaijan, and more recently in Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

The man at the helm of this effort to integrate drone ops fully into Marine warfare is Maj. Keenan Chirhart, head of the service’s new four-person intelligent robotics and autonomous systems office. The former executive officer of the Marines’ first Reaper squadron, Chirhart must bring organization to the tangle of unmanned and autonomous development efforts in progress around the service.

As Marine Corps elements raced to integrate unmanned technology to its operations, from aviation to logistics, he said, stovepipes developed, thwarting effective communication and planning.

One possible initiative under consideration, Chirhart said, is a common mission controller capable of -operating all unmanned systems, from small aerial drones to ground vehicles and even surface vessels.t told Marine Corps Times. “You’ve got this multifunctional, multidomain capability. And there certainly needs to be oversight, so that it’s not just being developed within one war-fighting domain.”

One possible initiative under consideration, Chirhart said, is a common mission controller capable of operating all unmanned systems, from small aerial drones to ground vehicles and even surface vessels.

“A modular controller would enable not only your decision-makers, at a strategic level, to see across all domains, but also allow, at the tactical level, multidomain control of different systems,” he said. “Those technologies exist right now; our [Marine Corps] Warfighting Lab has been experimenting with them.”

In the nearer future, Chirhart’s office will develop an experimentation road map that makes unmanned systems integral to overall Marine Corps technology experimentation efforts. The Force Design guidance lays the groundwork for the development of a dedicated unmanned experimental unit that can simulate multidomain operations featuring a range of intelligent robotics and autonomous systems.

Chirhart said his office is researching several privately owned range spaces where these experiments could take place and networking with commercial startups, think tanks and academic institutions as it determines that’s possible.

Marine leaders also are aware they need a stable career pipeline for unmanned systems. As the office collaborates with the Navy, which is developing a to strengthen its unmanned workforce, Chirhart said a similar Marine Corps military occupational specialty may be developed.

While the service already has a small unmanned aerial systems operator job and a dedicated job specialty for MQ-9 Reaper pilots, it lacks a cross-domain specialty to deliver expertise on autonomy and robotic warfare at large.

Discussions of a new military occupational specialty are “nascent,” Chirhart said, but added that the Corps is closely watching the Navy’s efforts to tackle the same career path problem.

“We’re not trying to replace the warfighter,” Chirhart said. “But we know that in the future, the warfighter is going to be augmented by teams of robotics and autonomous systems that operate in all domains. We want to understand what is the expertise needed to make sure that person is trained and equipped to be able to provide those functions for the Marine Corps in the future.”

Perhaps the most significant obstacle for the Marine Corps as it seeks to master smart drones and autonomy is the infamously sluggish acquisition process, built to take years, not months. Chirhart noted that any acquisition projects started today likely wouldn’t get funded until fiscal 2026.

“That is not going to allow the Marine Corps to keep pace with our adversary,” he said.

How to achieve rapid acquisition at scale is a problem that goes far beyond intelligent robotics and autonomous systems or the Marine Corps, but Chirhart said he’s optimistic that effective communication between Corps directorates, plus the unifying and specific directions within the Force Design update, will help the service move with speed and purpose.

“I think it’s very easy for everyone to look at what industry is producing and say, ‘I want that thing, I want that bright, shiny object,’” he said. “But what is more important in my mind is that we have a road map that is capabilities-centric, not platform-centric. It’s not that I care necessarily about a specific, intelligent robotic autonomous system. I want to look at what is the long-term overarching capability that the Marine Corps needs to execute its missions.”

The growing problem of inexpensive unmanned systems employing autonomy and artificial intelligence has been a longtime subject of military study and discussion.

But the ongoing conflict in Ukraine has underscored just how effective smart tech accessible to anyone may be in neutralizing the elaborate tools of conventional warfare. In one example from the war, Ukraine reportedly used a Chinese-made DJI drone worth $2,000 to destroy a Russian T-90 tank worth millions of dollars.

Drawing on a newfound urgency, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for research and engineering published a need statement in May, calling on industry to help develop new weapons that can effectively meet the new threat from unmanned, autonomous and AI defense-driven systems.

“Multi- and cross-domain Uncrewed Systems (UxS) continue to be a threat to U.S. forces around the world. This threat is expanding in all domestic and international regions,” the need statement begins, citing the directive in the 2022 National Defense Strategy to stay ahead of the problem. “This threat is no longer just in the aerial domain, but also from ground, subterranean, sea, and undersea domains. Near-peer adversary nations are rapidly incorporating robust UxS capabilities into their military formations, and non-state actors are using UxS to increase their asymmetric advantage.”

While aerial drones have had the most opportunities to make a mark on the battlefield, both in Ukraine and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the South Caucasus, undersea systems may not be far behind.

Ukrainian unmanned underwater vessels, such as the Toloka TLK-150, likely already have been responsible for limiting Russian aggression at sea.

And in the subterranean realm, expected to become an increasingly critical domain as more conflicts play out in and around big cities, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working to develop unmanned systems that can navigate the tight and dark spaces.

The newly published need statement calls for weapons that can destroy or stymie uncrewed threats in the following ways:

• Disable the detecting abilities of drone swarms.
• Create barriers or obstacles that thwart navigation.
• Use kinetic, directed-energy and control-link defenses to answer or avert physical and electronic attacks by uncrewed systems “without exhausting defensive capabilities.”
• Provide assessment capabilities to measure the effectiveness of these defensive approaches.

Notably, the Defense Department has provided a Ukraine aid package, announced in April, that included 30 mm gun trucks and laser-guided rocket systems designed to destroy drones. But the new need statement underscores how daunting it is to defeat a cheap, smart threat that keeps coming, no matter how many individual platforms are shot down.

“I would say that you should look at this need statement as basically saying: ‘OK, we recognize that these sorts of cheap and extremely numerous drones are likely to be an enduring part of future battlefields,’ ” said Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani Center for AI and Advanced Technologies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

While the individual services have experimented with counter-drone swarm weapons ― the Air Force Research Laboratory recently tested out a microwave system called the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, or THOR ― Allen said programs of record for effective counter-unmanned and counter-AI weapons have yet to materialize.

“Where is the mass procurement of this capability that reflects that it has an enduring place in the arsenal?” he wondered.

Allen added that effective jamming of remotely piloted drones is accelerating the move to systems that are truly autonomous — another development that challenges the status quo for the U.S. Meanwhile, Ukraine is reportedly losing 10,000 drones a month to Russian jammers

In a paper published in May, Allen highlighted the Defense Department’s slow progress in developing AI and autonomy capabilities, calling on program managers to interrogate their efforts and ensure their objectives are specific and achievable.

According to the published need statement, the three categories of technology most interesting to the Pentagon include:

• Novel sensors that track and identify drones faster and across domains, possibly through the application of AI and machine learning.
• Autonomous defensive technologies that attack enemy drones’ navigation systems and onboard artificial intelligence capabilities.
• Passive defeat capabilities that may target and exploit vulnerabilities in unmanned systems’ artificial intelligence algorithms, or that could cloak sites that drones might target.

James Ryseff, a senior technical policy analyst at the think tank Rand, said the Pentagon could learn from private sector development and adopt an approach focused more on innovation and creative solutions than on building to meet a specific requirement.

“Software is more like a research project than it is like a construction or just a manufacturing project,” he said.

Ryseff acknowledged that such a change in approach would require major shifts, such as bringing more software development capabilities in-house or bypassing parts of the traditional acquisition process.

He pointed to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ urgent personal intervention in the early 2000s to field mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles to troops encountering improvised explosive devices downrange as an example of how the Pentagon had been able to move quickly to acquire needed technology in the past.

However, Ryseff added, military leaders don’t appear concerned enough to consider such a radical response.

“There’s got to be some kind of a big ‘Oh, my gosh’ moment to get to that level of impact,” he said. “And right now, we don’t have it.”

Pentagon stakeholders plan to hold a meeting with industry representatives in July to discuss proposed counter-unmanned solutions and ways forward on development, according to the need statement.

After years of experimenting with airborne delivery drones, the service believes it has a winner.

In its fiscal 2024 budget request, the Marine Corps is asking to buy 41 tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems, or TRUAS, for a total investment of more than $13 million.

With the service set to take delivery of previous orders of the drones this spring and expecting to declare initial operational capability on the system later this fall, it will be a big year, not only for tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems, but also for the concept of unmanned aerial resupply.

Built like large quadcopters, the systems are designed to carry payloads of up to 150 pounds over distances of up to nine miles in containers secured underneath. The unit cost of about $325,000 per drone is certainly steep, but Marine officials say it’s substantially more sophisticated than the remote-controlled commercial drones it resembles.

Rather than being manually flown, tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems are programmed with waypoints that determine itinerary and flight pattern, meaning it requires less hands-on attention from Marine operators than most of the Corps’ quadcopters.

It takes just two Marines to monitor and maintain one in the field, and those Marines can learn everything they need to know about taking care of it in just five training days, according to Master Sgt. Chris Genualdi, an airborne and air delivery specialist with Combat Development and Integration, who discussed the system in an April news release.

The tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems concept is closely aligned with the Marine Corps’ all-consuming vision for future warfare, which involves small, independent units operating from great distances from austere outposts ― perhaps on islands in the vast Indo-Pacific.

While the system isn’t designed to cross the ocean with supplies, it might be dispatched from a ship to a landing zone in hostile conditions ashore that might preclude a helicopter or V-22 Osprey delivery.

“As system technology advances in future years, [Unmanned Expeditionary Systems] will … include emerging technologies to include autonomous distribution capabilities for elements across the MAGTF and [Marine Littoral Regiments], enabling more diversified distribution and the sustainment of Marine Corps forces across future operating environments,” officials wrote in fiscal 2024 budget justification documents.

Tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems provide “an organic battlefield logistics capability to distribute critical supplies via an unmanned platform while conducting” expeditionary advanced base operations safely within a weapons engagement zone, “where the risk to manned aircraft would deny manned aviation resupply operations.”

Marine leaders plan to scale the technology as it proves itself, according to the April news release, eventually building larger and higher-capacity platforms according to the same model that might further advance the objectives of the Corps’ expeditionary advanced base operations.

To this end, the service is also planning to launch a new military occupational specialty, or military job, focused on operating resupply drones. That job will be called small unmanned logistics system — air specialist. The timing of its rollout has not been announced.

In April, defense contractor Leidos announced a contract with the Marine Corps to build a larger autonomous drone prototype ― similar to a helicopter with a double stack of rotors ― that would be able to travel up to 100 nautical miles and carry up to 600 pounds.

“The utility of the TRUAS reaches beyond combat,” the recent Marine Corps release states, with its capabilities being highly effective in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts.

“In disaster areas that may not be accessible by conventional means, the TRUAS could be used to transport much needed supplies.”

The Corps contracted for 35 tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems drones in August 2022 and 30 more in March 2023, according to Marine Corps budget documents, but all are set for delivery in the first half of this year from SURVICE Engineering, out of Aberdeen, Maryland.

The effort to develop the tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems began in earnest with a Department of the Navy “fly-off” prize challenge launched in 2020 at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, to build a rugged and reliable small cargo-carrying drone. SURVICE took the $100,000 first-place prize in that effort.

While tactical resupply unmanned aircraft systems only have been employed in field user evaluations and training and not proven in combat, the Marine Corps has moved relatively quickly to make its delivery-drone requirement a reality.

It’s far from the only entity seeking to capitalize on reliable unmanned aerial logistics. In 2013, online retail giant Amazon made headlines when then-CEO Jeff Bezos announced that it would be delivering packages via aerial drone by 2018.

A decade later, Amazon has launched a very limited regional version of the service, and the company says it’s still working on developing its vision for “Amazon Prime Air.”