The Pentagon plan to Americanize drone warfare
At drone experiment outside Indianapolis, various elements came together to reveal the way forward.
Patrick Tucker | August 21, 2025 07:38 PM ET
CAMP ATTERBURY, Indiana–The Pentagon has been talking about rapidly scaling up drone forces for years—efforts that so far have produced interesting new prototypes and lively demonstrations. But while the services conduct experiments using small numbers of drones, there has not been a clear sense of how the United States would conduct sustained drone warfare, or how closely it would resemble what is happening today in Ukraine.
However, a combination of recent developments, tech breakthroughs, and policy changes suggests that could soon change. And the picture that has emerged is that future U.S. drone warfare will look like Ukraine—if Ukraine had had a cheat code before the Russian invasion.
The Technology Readiness Experimentation event, or T-REX, here this month brought together drone makers, AI, data, and communications software companies to show off not just how well new autonomous drones can hit targets, but also next steps for mass, coordinated drone warfare—the sort being used on the front lines of Ukraine, but at a far greater scale.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2025/08/pentagon-plan-americanize-drone-warfare/407625/?oref=d1-featured-river-secondary
