The department premiered WarMatrix for its inaugural use at the March 27 GE 26 Benchmark Wargame, marking the system’s move from development into operational capacity, according to a Tuesday Air Force release.

WarMatrix, described by the force as an “active wargaming environment,” is an AI-powered system that integrates existing models, data and workflows while expediting analysis.

The Air Force at the end of 2025 said it was looking for technology capable of producing simulations 10,000 times faster than real time.

WarMatrix is a “human-machine teaming system” meant to keep human judgment integral to planning and decision making, according to the release.

The use of WarMatrix during the event served as the system’s initial operating concept evaluation, signaling a change in how the Air Force conducts operational analysis and wargaming.

“Designed by wargamers for wargamers, WarMatrix provides transparency, auditability and speed, enabling decision-makers to better understand assumptions, outcomes and tradeoffs,” the statement reads.

Air Force leaders portray WarMatrix as an evolution in wargaming rather than a replacement, and the release says that the use of WarMatrix provided a more “connected and traceable wargaming process.”

It also said that the system’s design allowed for faster scenario development, repeat findings and increased collaboration with joint and coalition partners.

The two-weekslong event, hosted at Systems Planning and Analysis in Alexandria, Virginia, was attended by more than 150 people, including technical experts, Air Force leadership and allied planners.

Attendees during the event fulfilled more than six 24-hour “game-time moves” that balanced physics- and simulation-based models to ensure outcomes were realistic.

The defense technology firm introduced the system, known as MAYHEM 10, which expands upon its Switchblade family.

The Army in February announced a $186 million purchase that includes two variants of Switchblade one-way attack, or “kamikaze,” drones: the Switchblade 600 Block 2 variant and the Switchblade 300 Block 20 variant.

The difference is that MAYHEM 10 is multifunctional, meaning it can perform tasks in addition to striking. The new system can carry a 10-pound payload and has a range of over 62 miles, per the release.

The system is capable of 50 minutes of endurance, with a launch assembly that can be done in under five minutes, the statement says. It can also be launched from the air, ground or maritime platforms.

“By integrating advanced autonomy, multi-domain payloads, and rapid adaptability, we empower our forces to sense, disrupt, and strike with precision — even in the most contested environments,” Wahid Nawabi, AeroVironment’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in the statement.

Last year, U.S. soldiers tested the Switchblade 600 system, which has a range of 27 miles and is designed to engage a target using onboard cameras.

The Switchblade 300 Block 20, unlike the heavier 600 variant, is small enough to be carried in a backpack. For the first time, according to a February AeroVironment announcement, it will come equipped with an Explosively Formed Penetrator, a deadly warhead that is made to penetrate armored vehicles.

The U.S. military is paving the way for the regular deployment of high-energy laser weapons on American soil for air defense amid the expanding threat of low-cost weaponized drones.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Defense Department have reached a “landmark safety agreement” regarding the use of laser weapons to counter unauthorized drones at the US-Mexico border following a safety assessment that concluded such countermeasures “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft,” the FAA announced Friday.

The assessment and resulting agreement were the direct result of two laser incidents along the southern border of Texas in February, which prompted the FAA to abruptly close nearby airspace amid concerns over the potential impact on civilian air traffic. The incidents involved the U.S. Army’s 20 kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL), a vehicle-mounted version of defense contractor AV’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System.

In the first incident, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol personnel used an AMP-HEL on loan from the Pentagon to engage an unidentified target near Fort Bliss, triggering an airspace shutdown above El Paso on Feb. 11. In the second, U.S. military personnel used an AMP-HEL near Fort Hancock to neutralize a “seemingly threatening” drone that turned out to belong to CBP, spurring another shutdown on Feb. 27.

“Following a thorough, data-informed Safety Risk Assessment, we determined that these systems do not present an increased risk to the flying public,” FAA administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement. “We will continue working with our interagency partners to ensure the National Airspace System remains safe while addressing emerging drone threats.”

The “first of its kind” safety assessment, conducted in early March by the FAA and the Pentagon’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) counter-drone organization at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reportedly yielded two significant conclusions: 1) the LOCUST’s automatic shutoff mechanism will consistently prohibit the system from firing under unsafe circumstances, a point that AV executives have emphasized in recent weeks, and 2) in the event of a system failure, the laser beam itself cannot inflict catastrophic damage even on aircraft flying at its maximum effective range, let alone those at cruising altitudes.

Here’s how Aaron Westman, AV senior director for business development, described the LOCUST’s safety protocols in a company blog post on March 23:

Every time an operator presses the “fire” button, the system runs through a series of automated checks. Some examples include:

• Is the laser pointing away from protected “keep-out” zones?
• Are all internal subsystems operating within safe parameters?
• Is the system properly locked onto a target?
• Are safety interlock switches engaged?
• Are all software safety checks satisfied?

Each of these checks acts as a safety “vote.”

If any subsystem registers a “no vote,” the laser simply will not fire. An operator can press the trigger — and nothing happens. The system refuses to engage until all conditions are verified as safe.

These automated safeguards are built into both the hardware and the software of the system.

Here’s how DefenseScoop described the LOCUST’s potential effects on passing airframes based on an account from Army Col. Scott McLellan, JIATF-401 deputy director, of the testing at White Sands:

McLellan said the evaluation involved “localized” firing of the AMP-HEL from various distances at the fuselage of a Boeing 767 airliner that testers lugged on to White Sands to assess the system’s damaging effects, “or lack thereof” on aircraft material. He said it aimed to “disprove some myths” about the capability, noting “that energy clearly dissipates over time and space and doesn’t have the effect everyone thinks it does as far as lasers are concerned.”

A JIATF 401 spokesperson said the laser was fired at its “maximum effective range for up to 8 seconds” at the grounded fuselage, “demonstrating that even at full intensity, the laser caused no structural damage to the aircraft.”

As drone warfare spreads beyond distant conflicts, laser weapons are an increasingly attractive domestic countermeasure. While kinetic interceptors and electronic warfare may be considered suitable for chaotic battlefields, their potential for collateral effects makes them far too risky for consistent domestic applications. And even if collateral damage wasn’t a concern, expending expensive missiles on the 1,000 cartel-operated drones that cross the border with Mexico monthly is economically unsustainable, especially for a Pentagon that’s already rapidly burning through munitions as part of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. On paper, the argument seems obvious: Why not save those critical interceptors for high-end threats overseas and let domestic laser emplacements, with their deep magazines and minimal cost-per-shot, pull counter-drone duty at home?

Using laser weapons for domestic air defense wouldn’t be unprecedented. France deployed two 2 kw High Energy Laser for Multiple Applications – Power (HELMA-P) systems to secure the airspace over the country’s Île-de-France region during the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics. This past September, China’s People’s Liberation Army deployed several laser weapons across Beijing during a major military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II. As of January, the U.K. Ministry of Defense was reportedly drawing up plans to build a domestic laser screen, albeit composed of lower-power laser dazzlers, to protect military installations and other critical infrastructure. The Pentagon has even already considered laser weapons to reinforce the airspace above Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s residences at Fort McNair in Washington following a series of unauthorized drone incursions there.

Indeed, there’s a distinct possibility that laser weapons could see increasing domestic applications amid the U.S. military’s growing appetite for novel drone defenses. On April 2, JIATF-401 announced that it had funneled $20 million in counter-drone systems like the Dronebuster EW handset and Smart Shooter computerized riflescope to the U.S.-Mexico border in just four months.

Days later, the task force announced $100 million to enhance counter-drone capabilities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup starting in June “to protect stadiums and fan zones in 11 cities across nine states,” part of larger $600 million surge in counter-drone systems that also allocated $158 million to “defend the nation’s highest-priority defense critical infrastructure.”

With the Pentagon asking for $580 million in R&D funding just for JIATF-401 in its fiscal year 2027 budget request (and potentially $800 million in procurement cash), the task force appears poised to explore any and all possible solutions to the drone problem — and operationally, the FAA-Pentagon safety agreement helps establish laser weapons as a viable option.

That said, the safety agreement on its own is unlikely to open the floodgates for a sudden spate of laser weapon deployments along the U.S.-Mexico border, let alone for major events like the World Cup or critical infrastructure just yet. First, the agreement doesn’t appear to clarify who has final say in authorizing a laser engagement when U.S. military, CBP and FAA jurisdictions overlap — the precise ambiguity that yielded February’s airspace closures and, until resolved, will complicate future engagements during a fast-moving crisis. Second, the U.S. military’s arsenal of operational laser weapons is currently limited despite a stated goal of rapidly fielding new systems at scale within three years. Even with clear plans to surge directed energy research and development for homeland defense under President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome for America” missile shield, the age of sleek beam directors quietly standing watch along the US-Mexico border remains a long way off.

The FAA agreement may end up laying the foundation for a true domestic laser air defense architecture — a “Laser Dome” in all but name. Whether the U.S. military actually builds it, however, will depend not just the Pentagon’s promise to deploy laser weapons at scale, but whether Washington can finally sort out who’s in charge when a beam crosses into civilian airspace.

Video released Wednesday shows the next-gen munitions being launched in open desert terrain from M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems as part of Operation Epic Fury. The operation against Iran has seen a variety of precision munitions launched from land, sea and air, according to CENTCOM.

“I just could not be prouder of our men and women in uniform leveraging innovation to create dilemmas for the enemy,” Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, said in a release.

The PrSM is enhanced with GPS capabilities to navigate in flight and can accurately strike targets from around 250 miles away. Its warhead is designed to deliver a fragmentation effect when it explodes, increasing power on impact. The missile, meanwhile, is reportedly built to withstand turbulent in-flight conditions.

The PrSM is among a wide array of advanced technological assets the U.S. military has deployed during its ongoing operations in Iran.

Other notable weapon deployments in the ongoing conflict include Patriot Interceptor Missile Systems and THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems. LUCAS one-way attack drones were also used for the first time in combat by the U.S. Special Operations Command-led Task Force Scorpion Strike.

Specific details about the targets engaged by the PrSMs have not been provided as of publication.

Prior to its combat debut, the U.S. Army was working with Lockheed Martin to ramp up production capacity for the munition, Defense News reported last October.

The Army tested its short-range and long-range capabilities on White Sands Missile Range in April and September of last year. Tests saw the munitions fired from HIMARS systems as well as the M270A2 Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS.

Operation Epic Fury has seen over 2,000 military targets across Iran destroyed, the Pentagon said, including a naval frigate that was sunk in the first torpedo kill by a U.S. Navy submarine since World War II.

The Defense Department’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 announced the agreement with Perennial Autonomy on February 4, which will see deliveries of the Bumblebee V2 start next month.

The Bumblebee V2, a first-person view drone with four rotors, acts as its own drone hunter-killer system. Advanced artificial intelligence software enables it to identify other unmanned aerial vehicles and engage them in combat. It attacks other drones and knocks them out of the sky with a direct physical collision.

“This decision puts kinetic [counter-small] UAS capability into the hands of our troops immediately,” Army Brig. Gen. Matthew Ross, JIATF-401 director, said in a statement.

“The Bumblebee V2 provides a cost-effective, reliable interceptor that can neutralize threats without endangering our own forces or surrounding infrastructure. On the modern battlefield, where drones are a constant threat, having a low-collateral kinetic option is not just an advantage; it is increasingly becoming essential for protecting our forces.”

Direct physical strikes on unmanned aerial vehicles, known as “hard kills,” can produce a blast radius and scatter sharp debris when munitions are used.

With a drone-on-drone strike, the Bumblebee minimizes these risks. Having one flying drone tackle another eliminates the need for bullets and potentially harmful explosions. This potential could see the Bumblebee used efficiently in urban areas.

Additionally, the system is compliant with updated regulations in the National Defense Authorization Act, which has strict requirements for the use of foreign components. Drones with NDAA compliance, such as the HANX drone developed by the U.S. Marines, can be adopted for military use with immediate effect.

The Army’s Global Response Force will assess the system in support of the Lt. Gen. James M. Gavin Joint Innovation Outpost, a new facility opened at Fort Bragg on Jan. 3 to bring together soldiers, academics and private industry to develop and test new technology.

The vulnerability to such “prompt injection attacks” exists because large language models, the backbone of chatbots that digest hordes of user text to generate responses, cannot distinguish between malicious and trusted user instructions.

“The AI is not smart enough to understand that it has an injection inside, so it carries out something it’s not supposed to do,” Liav Caspi, a former member of the Israel Defense Forces cyberwarfare unit, told Defense News.

In effect, “an enemy has been able to turn somebody from the inside to do what they want,” such as deleting records or biasing decisions, according to Caspi, who co-founded Legit Security, which recently spotted one such security hole in Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot.

“It’s like having a spy in your ranks,” he said.

Former military officials say that, with greater reliance on chatbots and hackers backed by China, Russia and other nations already instructing Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Copilot to create malware and fake personas, a prompt injection that orders the bots themselves to copy files or spread lies looms near.

Microsoft’s annual digital defense report, released last month, for the first time said, “AI systems themselves have become high-value targets, with adversaries amping up use of methods like prompt injection.”

What’s more, the problem of prompt injection has no easy solution, OpenAI and security researchers say.

An attack simply involves hiding malicious instructions — sometimes in white or tiny text — in a chatbot or content that the chatbot reads, such as a blog post or PDF.

For example, a security researcher demonstrated a prompt injection attack against OpenAI’s new AI-based browser, ChatGPT Atlas, in which the chatbot responded, “Trust No AI,” when a user asked for an analysis of a Google Docs file about horses that concealed malicious commands. Also, last month, a researcher tipped Microsoft off to a prompt injection vulnerability in Copilot that may have allowed attackers to trick the chatbot into stealing sensitive data, including emails.

In an emailed statement, Microsoft said its security team continuously tries hacking Copilot to find any prompt injection vulnerabilities, blocks users who try to exploit any found and monitors for abnormal chatbot behavior, among other tactics.

“Microsoft ensures its generative AI systems remain resilient against evolving threats for all our customers, including defense and national security,” the statement said.

Responding publicly to criticism on X, Dane Stuckey, OpenAI’s chief information security officer, wrote that “prompt injection remains a frontier, unsolved security problem, and our adversaries will spend significant time and resources to find ways to make ChatGPT agent fall for these attacks.”

Along the same lines, Caspi said, “You cannot prevent the prompt injection [fully], but you need to limit the impact.” He advised that organizations limit an AI assistant’s access to sensitive data and limit the user’s access to other organizational data.

For instance, the Army has awarded contracts worth at least $11 million to deploy Ask Sage, a tool that lets users restrict which Army data Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Gemini and other AI models can access to run queries and tasks. Ask Sage also isolates Army data from user prompts and external data sources.

Caspi, who is not an Army contractor, likened a prompt injection attack against an organization running Ask Sage to a lockdown situation where “you’ve got this insider, but it’s sitting in one room, and it can’t leave the room or carry out sensitive information.”

Andre Slonopas, a Virginia Army National Guard member and former Army cyber and information operations officer, uses Ask Sage and voiced confidence in the Army’s defensive AI tools, if not those of nuclear power plants or manufacturing entities, largely in rural, poorer areas.

The Virginia National Guard joined with essential services, such as power utilities, to help defend their networks against AI-powered cyberattacks, as part of a September simulation, given that service disruptions can jeopardize military preparations.

Typically, an adversary encrypts its network traffic to evade detection, but, for the sake of an experiment, organizers did not encrypt the AI offender’s traffic because “we wanted the blue team [of humans] to see exactly what the AI was doing,” Slonopas said.

“The blue team was absolutely defeated,” despite being able to watch the AI scanning its networks, creating fake usernames to gain unauthorized access and executing instructions to defeat the team’s systems.

“Whether the AI is doing prompt injection, spoofing or maybe even some sort of a brute force attack, the speed of AI is so unbelievably immense that simply human beings cannot counter it,” and, therefore, “you have to make cybersecurity AI more accessible and more affordable,” Slonopas said.

“If a water utility has to pay, say, $30,000 for a defensive AI license, well, it will amplify one person to be like 40″ or dozens of personnel, he said.

In response to questions, Army Cyber Command spokesperson Kyle Alvarez said in an emailed statement, “Due to the current lapse in appropriations, ARCYBER was unable to accept or respond to any media engagements or requests.”

Army contractors, too, are under attack from state-affiliated AI.

“China is using offensive AI like nobody else,” said Nicolas Chaillan, the founder of Ask Sage and a former U.S. Air Force and Space Force chief software officer.

“We see so many attacks coming after us,” all of which the company has stopped, Chaillan added.

A military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the geopolitical sensitivity of the matter, said that China does “appear” to be the most skilled in offensive AI. However, the official added, AI spoofing and translation allow the United States, China, Iran, other countries, hacktivists and financial cybercriminals to masquerade as one another.

For example, the official said, “Right now, with ChatGPT, I can program in Chinese. I don’t speak Chinese, but because of the ChatGPT capabilities that I have, I can do that.”

Aliya Sternstein, J.D., is an investigative journalist who has covered technology, cognition, and national security since Napster shut down, working for various outlets including Atlantic Media, Christian Science Monitor, Daily Beast, Forbes Magazine and Just Security. She is also a research analyst at Georgetown Law.

Speaking Tuesday at an Axios event in National Harbor, Maryland, on AI’s emerging defense capabilities, Sean Moriarty, CEO of artificial intelligence and data analysis firm PrimerAI, urged the Defense Department to accelerate its efforts to adapt to the rapidly changing threat landscape by taking advantage of existing technology.

The commercial world is far ahead of the government in the world of artificial intelligence, Moriarty said at the event, which was just a short walk away from the Air and Space Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference.

“The gap is enormous,” he said.

The significant divide is between what’s available and what’s being used, he explained.

PrimerAI creates AI products that help users, including the U.S. government and commercial companies, parse through and analyze information.

Notably, the company’s technology proved adept at identifying misleading or false information that spread rapidly online in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

The events of Oct. 7 underscored the complexity and dangers of the world, Moriarty said at Tuesday’s event. While the world has always been perilous, he argued, challenges were compounded by the nonstop flow of information, misinformation and disinformation.

AI was a useful tool in helping the US government mitigate this constant stream, Moriarty said, with the ability to uncover the truth and then use it to drive action.

He expressed hope AI could help the Defense Department prevent the spread of distorted facts, but acknowledged that, if prevention isn’t possible, containing misinformation and disinformation was a viable outcome.

If there’s hesitation about relying on technology to make important decisions, Moriarty argued, people should consider the trust they’ve already placed in machines such as calculators, autopilot systems and software.

Regardless, Moriarity noted adopting AI technology will require a collective Defense Department approach — a challenging task to implement. He wondered what could realistically bring about the change he believes the department urgently needs.

“If you look at the nation’s finest hours, it’s typically been on the receiving end of some profoundly negative externality which gave us no choice but to respond to the threat,” Moriarty said. “I think the big challenge upon us now is we recognize the world is increasingly dangerous. Can we actually get ahead, or is the necessary forcing function a terrible event which allows us to just rip out these barriers to innovation and response?”

The right conversations are happening, according to Moriarty, but the country needs to move faster.

“People are singing from the same song sheet and it is the right song,” he said.

In early August, the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, conducted a 500-mile air assault from their home station to the Joint Readiness Training Center. On Aug. 22, the brigade launched a large-scale combat maneuver using novel approaches, homegrown technology and smaller headquarters.

The brigade is one of three currently experimenting with various tech, from electromagnetic spectrum tools and hide, decoy or detect signatures to counter-drone capabilities and nimble, small-footprint command posts running operations — which once took 60 troops — with only eight soldiers.

The two additional brigades, the Hawaii-stationed 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division and the Fort Drum, New York-based 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division are in earlier stages of developing such tech, with combat training center rotations planned for later this year and early 2025.

By this time next year, other brigades within these brigades’ divisions could see formations transform, with new tech at their fingertips for a “fight tonight” scenario, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said.

The Army’s efforts to transform the entire combat force over the next five years are expected to yield tangible results in the next year among those three brigades, added Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.

It’s all part of a larger initiative, announced in 2023, called “Transformation in Contact.” The effort puts soldiers at the center of solving tactical problems at the brigade level and below.

Many assets formerly part of the brigade-centric fight are now going to be the division level, which Army leaders say will lighten the operational burden on brigades, freeing them to do what brigades are supposed to do: destroy things.

The 101st is working with the Mobile Brigade Combat Team concept, which centers mobility around the infantry squad vehicle, said Capt. Charles O’Hagan, company commander for the brigades recon company.

That simple adjustment allowed a newly formed brigade reconnaissance company to go into the wood line Aug. 14 and work through Aug. 23 without the need for resupply, O’Hagan said. A dismounted company would require resupply in half that time.

In recent years, the Army has sought to shrink command posts for brigades and divisions, getting away from bulky, multivehicle convoys with massive radar dishes, antenna farms and tents that took hours to set up.

Army leaders point to Ukraine as a real-world example. Russian forces got bogged down early in the war and saw hundreds of operational commanders killed as Ukrainian troops employed simple signals intelligence detection and strike methods with drones and other cheap devices.

But even getting to the fight requires reconfiguring the way brigades have approached maneuver for more than 20 years.

A Global War on Terror-era brigade would hold about 4,300 soldiers. That number now sits at 3,000.

Sylvia said the division command elements of the Fort Campbell brigade performed mobile strike missions requiring 76 aircraft to haul more than 2,000 soldiers and 252 pieces of equipment across more than 500 miles on two avenues of approach. That maneuver necessitated at least two refueling points before troops hit the ground at 14 different landing zones.

Another 700 soldiers were needed to manage the forward area refueling points along the route from Fort Campbell to Fort Johnson, he said.

The 500-mile mark is key, Sylvia added. If the Army can strike from that distance, they can strike nearly any important feature of Russia, China, Iran or North Korea from regional installations.

The division practiced this sort of long-range assault in January using legacy gear and approaches, the two-star said.

“What we found was a huge disconnect between the brigade and its ability to communicate, and between the division and the brigades to be able to control those formations,” Sylvia said.

In their follow-up exercise, the brigade was able to use commercial tech, two avenues of approach and refueling points to better manage movement, Sylvia said.

“Our forward area refueling points are the lifeblood of this division,” Sylvia said.

Combat aviation brigade must be available to each brigade commander but coordinated by the division to be effective in moving all elements.

Moving assets to the division has streamlined the brigade, reducing time for many functions and allowing more creative tactics in combat training.

Soldiers now operate from four Humvees, one infantry squad vehicle and a 200-square-foot command post with smaller, distant antenna cluster. This replaces the previous 600-square-foot command post with an antenna farm and eight-plus vehicles and trailers.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vidal Perez, who works communication for 2nd Brigade’s command post, said setup and teardown used to take 30 to 45 minutes, which often meant colocating antennas with the command post — a setup that emitted a large signal for anyone looking to strike the brigade’s headquarters.

Now, with everything running on a cloud network and using commercial satellite technology, setup and teardown take just 10 to 20 minutes, Perez said.

Perez’s team have even set up “decoy” command posts by using commercially purchased circuit cards and power supplies, labeling them as 2nd Brigade Command Post and other names and dumping them in clusters in the woods for the opposition to detect and strike.

And when they strike, they reveal their positions for a counterattack.

In October, the 2nd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division is slated for its own test with a rotation through the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center in Hawaii.

That validation event will provide lessons for the future brigades. The 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division is set for a combat training center rotation in 2025.

As the three brigades share lessons from their experiments, Army senior leaders will evaluate their adjustments over the coming year. Successful outcomes are expected to spread across other brigades within their respective divisions, George said.

How Army unit composition has evolved

Looking at the differences between the Army’s pre-2004 division-centric setup, its post-GWOT brigade-centric construction and its 2030 construct, unit composition looks like the following:

Pre-2004 division-centric

• Three infantry brigades
• Two combat aviation brigades
• Sustainment brigade
• Artillery brigade
• Support command
• Signal battalion
• Air defense artillery battalion
• Military intelligence battalion
• Engineer battalion

GWOT brigade-centric

• Four infantry brigades
• Two combat aviation brigades
• Division sustainment brigade
• Division artillery brigade
• Special troops battalion

New division 2030 working construct

• Three mobile brigade combat teams
• One combat aviation brigade
• Division sustainment brigade
• Division artillery brigade
• Signal battalion
• Military intelligence battalion
• Engineer battalion
• Mobile protected firepower battalion
• Counter drone battery

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to correctly identify the brigade from 10th Mountain Division that is participating in the Army’s Transforming in Contact experiments.

While these supplies are traditionally delivered to Navy vessels via manned aircraft, such assets are expensive and facing manning shortages — causing delays that drones could remedy, according to Navy officials.

The Curtis Wilbur conducted flight tests using the Skyways V2.6 Unmanned Aerial System and PteroDynamics X-P4 Unmanned Aerial System, launching and recovering six drones between from June 19 to June 24 as part of the Just In Time Delivery logistics effort with the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division.

“The Navy continues to drive rapid experimentation and implementation of new technologies,” Cmdr. Yilei Liu, commanding officer of the Curtis Wilbur, said in a statement. “While easy to configure and ready to deploy, it is vital to evaluate these technologies in different environmental conditions to define and scope the operating envelopes of these highly capable platforms.”

In 2021, Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division awarded PteroDynamics a contract to deliver three vertical take-off and landing drone prototypes to the Navy to assist delivering repair cargo.

“Embedding autonomous platforms into our already-existing systems will define the nature of combat operations in the future,” Liu said. “Once tested, autonomous systems can provide independent defensive and offensive capabilities in a contested environment. These systems can perform potentially dangerous, high-risk evolutions with maximum efficiency and minimal risk to personnel.”

Exercise Rim of the Pacific, known as RIMPAC, is a biennial exercise held near the Hawaiian Islands and involves nearly 30 nations and more than 25,000 personnel.

The exercise concludes on Aug. 1.

The focus of the Ramstein Legacy drill, held June 3-14, was on developing the alliance’s integrated air and missile defense with an additional eye on combating Class 1 unmanned aerial system threats — a reference to small, mini and micro drones.

Participating units hailed from Romania, Germany, Portugal, Hungary, France, Turkey and Poland, supported by British and Finnish fighter jets. In addition, three companies were invited to introduce some of their counter-drone equipment, including the U.S.-based firm Echodyne, the French CS Group, and German electronics specialist Rohde & Schwarz.

“Class 1 UAS have become one of the most important threats we observe at the moment in military conflicts. Where for many years having air superiority was one of the pillars of the NATO doctrine, we have seen recently that’s no longer the case,” said Cristian Coman, chief scientist at the joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance center at NATO’s Communications and Information Agency (NCIA).

On the first day of the training, participants were asked to get familiar with the capabilities of the systems at the exercise, including electronic warfare equipment, radars, and command-and-control systems.

The following days were focused on practical exercises and hands-on training, with each scenario increasing in difficulty. Part of the personnel involved in this segment were officers from the Italian C-UAS Center of Excellence, who performed the job of the enemy.

“We are here acting in the role of the red team in this exercise, where we are the threat the trainees need to identify and counteract. We are flying the drones, which are common civilian ones,” Italian Navy Lt. Cmdr. Federico Fugazzotto told reporters.

Some of the models displayed included the American-made Parrot Disco first-person-view drone as well as two Chinese-made DJI types. Exercise participants were instructed to use their detection equipment for picking up the drones’ electronic signatures.

According to Fugazzotto, increasingly complex scenarios entailed flights of varying lengths, hiding the drones’ points of departure on the ground, and attacking with multiple systems at once.

Crimea mirage

As the training unfolded, experts with NCIA confirmed to Defense News that GPS spoofing was detected and affected some of the drones, though officials did not name the source. The interference method feeds false coordinates to drone navigation systems in an effort to crash or disorient them.

“When I had the hand-held device from the drone, where you basically have the controller, my hand device would ‘be’ on a foreign location in Crimea,” Mario Behn, the principal scientist at NCIA, told Defense News. “But the drone was still here, which of course is physically impossible, as it is a huge range,”

On both days of Ramstein Legacy, data provided by the website GPSJam showed a high level of GPS interference that encompassed all of Constanta.

Military personnel here were vague about anti-jamming techniques and equipment used to mitigate interference, citing security concerns in revealing Western countermeasures.

The extensive level of jamming was also apparent in the area surrounding the nearby Mihail Kogalniceanu air base, where Finnish F/A-18 fighter jets and British Eurofighters were deployed. The exercise marked Finland’s first foreign deployment for NATO since joining the alliance in April 2023.

When asked if he was used to flying amid this amount of jamming, Lt. Col. Rami Lindström, commander of the Finnish F/A-18 detachment in Romania, acknowledged the GPS interference but appeared unfazed about it affecting the equipment.

“We have a lot of reports in Finland about the same kind of jamming, so we are used to that. But the F-18 is a warhorse and is resistant against that,” Lindström told Defense News in an interview.

“You can say we know our neighbor and we like to share this knowledge with our allies,” the Finnish official added, referring to Russia.

Back to school

In 2019, NCIA established an academy in Oeiras, Portugal, to provide training on NATO systems devoted to communications, air command and control, and cybersecurity. With drones omnipresent in today’s military thinking, the school’s emphasis is about to change.

“Our idea would be to add a counter-UAS curriculum with educational courses followed by enhanced practical training, which would be very easy to integrate at the Portugal academy,” Behn said.

There are some hurdles to that end, however, especially when it comes to standardizing hands-on training.

For one, the drone arsenals of NATO countries are so diverse that finding cross-cutting training approaches will be tricky. That is in addition to the ceaseless cat-and-mouse game of buying improved drones and superior countermeasures.

“Procurement processes take years, except we don’t have years to defend against those small drone threats,” Coman said.