Marine Corps stands up ‘attack drone team' to take lessons from Ukraine and teach them to grunts
The Marine Corps has established an attack drone team as part of an effort to make sure rifle squads have the technology and tactics to find and destroy enemies up to 20 kilometers away, said Col. Scott Cuomo, head of Weapons Training Battalion, Quantico.
Much like the Marine Corps Shooting Team played a key role in the Corps' rollout of the M27 Infantry Assault Rifle, the attack drone team will be instrumental in efforts to adopt first-person view drones, or FPVs, Cuomo told Task & Purpose.
'The attack drone team now has a mission to become the experts at this,' Cuomo said. 'Someone has got to be the best in any organization and then have the best knowledge to teach it.'
The Marine Corps' decision to stand up the attack drone team comes as the entire U.S. military is gleaning lessons from Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, which have shown how much power drones have to shape modern battlefields. The Army announced last year that it was making changes to basic training so that soldiers learn how to conceal themselves from enemy drones.
The attack drone team is working on developing the tactics, techniques, and procedures for using FPVs, Cuomo said.
'How do you train a Marine that way?' Cuomo said. 'What are the tasks? What are the conditions, the environments that you're training that Marine in? What are the standards that they have to meet? So that's all what we're working through right now every single day. As we're speaking, Marines are working through that.'
Starting in fiscal year 2026, the attack drone team will take part in Marine Corps Marksmanship Competitions to teach other Marines new ways to use FPVs, said Maj. Hector Infante, a spokesperson for Training and Education Command.
The attack drone team will also take part in U.S. and international competitions involving small drones and FPVs and share what they learn with the rest of the Corps, Infante told Task & Purpose.
All the Marines who are part of the attack drone team are volunteers, with some coming from the Weapons Training Battalion, Infante said. Additional Marines will be able to join the team with the start of the fiscal year 2026 Marine Corps Marksmanship Competition season.
Marine Corps officials have yet to determine if the attack drone team will be involved in helping to field FPVs to Marine units, Infante said.
The U.S. military needs to make sure that troops at the lowest tactical level are equipped with drones for offensive operations, said retired Marine Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., who led U.S. Central Command from 2019 to 2022.
'Drones. cheap drones, you can fly 10 of them in a day if you have to — what they do is, they provide SA [situational awareness] around you — you can see where you're going — and then you need drones that will provide lethal effects,' McKenzie told Task & Purpose.
At the same time, the military needs to continuously improve its counter drone defenses because the technology for unmanned aerial systems is advancing rapidly, McKenzie said.
'We've got to look day-to-day at what is happening in Ukraine in order to bring those lessons back to the United States,' McKenzie said.
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