‘Top Gun’ for drones: Pentagon plans August exercise with FPV drone units
“At this next T-REX [Technology Readiness Experimentation exercise], we’ll be starting to host TOPGUN school,” said prototyping & experimentation director Alex Lovett. “We’re going to be playing Red versus Blue, their best [offense] coming after our best defense.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on July 18, 2025 at 3:30 PM
WASHINGTON — With President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “unleashing American drone dominance” in both civil and military aviation, the Pentagon is taking a Biden-era experimentation program and turning up the heat with Top Gun-style air combat training for FPV operators.
“Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” Hegseth told reporters in the Pentagon courtyard at a “drone day” exhibition of new, domestically built unmanned systems.
“Our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones each year,” Hegseth said. But, he warned, the US military and defense industry were well behind. “We will speed up the timeline of rapid innovation. We have to, on behalf of our warfighters.”
One of the surprising innovations in Ukraine has been the recent rise of first-person view (FPV) drones, controlled by wearing a virtual reality headset that lets the operator see through the drone’s front-mounted sensors as if they were onboard themselves. Originally built for recreational drone races, FPV drones have been adapted by both sides to serve as low-cost precision-guided missiles. While notoriously tricky to control, these armed FPVs have proven remarkably effective on the battlefield — if the operator has the reflexes and the training to handle them.
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/07/top-gun-for-drones-pentagon-plans-august-exercise-with-fpv-drone-units/
