In mid-December, Col. Scott Cuomo, the commander of Marine Corps Base Quantico‘s Weapons Training Battalion, walked into a holiday party with senior service officials wearing an ugly Christmas sweater.
Within minutes and amid the holiday jubilation, he was confronted by a problem — and subsequently a mission — that has been top of mind for officials across the Marine Corps and the broader Department of Defense, especially as the war in Ukraine continues to rage on: drones.
“‘We are way behind where we need to be on everything to do with drones,'” he recalled being told at the holiday party. “‘How would you feel about taking on a drone team mission similar to what Weapons Training Battalion has done with the Marine Corps shooting team for 124 years?'”
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Just a few days after the New Year and nearly three weeks after Cuomo received his mission, the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team was born — part of the service’s response and now the ground-level epicenter in the effort to deal with the rapid proliferation of first-person view, or FPV, drones.
The Marine Corps announced the establishment of the team Monday, and said that the primary mission of its handful of members would be to internalize lessons learned from modern combat scenarios, provide feedback to the fleet on developing drone technologies, and compete in interservice, international and national contests to hone and showcase their skills.
The establishment of the team represents a watershed and urgent moment for the Marine Corps. It’s a service-level attempt at answering broader implications of modern drone warfare while industry, academia and the overall military continue to grapple with and scale the capability for future conflicts.
Since the 1990s, drone production and technology had plugged along at a “steady diffusion,” according to the Center for a New American Security. But the market that the U.S. and Israel once dominated was “long gone” after rivals such as China and Iran began developing their own low-cost drones.
The urgency only increased after Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when drone transfers skyrocketed and first-person videos of cheaply made “suicide” and reconnaissance drones launching across eastern Europe spread across social media — and also into the minds of military planners who realized that the nature of combined warfare had changed dramatically.
“The general feedback of everyone who is associated with a unit that is going to be the first foot in the next fight is that we’re in trouble if we don’t figure out this drone thing,” Nathan Ecelbarger, the president of the United States National Drone Association, said in an interview with Military.com on Monday.
The USNDA has been a critical aspect in the emergence of the Marine Corps’ drone team by providing a mechanism through competitions where service members can bolster their competency with the equipment. It also offers a chance to test “tech vs. tech,” where industry, academia and service leaders can meet and collaborate, Ecelbarger said, which would bear fruitful datasets in an industry that changes nearly “every three days.”
The Marine Corps Attack Drone Team will take part in its first competition against the 75th Ranger Regiment starting in late June, an event hosted by the USNDA’s Military Drone Crucible Championship in Florida.
“There are very few places in the U.S. where you can even test laser, counter-UAS [unmanned aircraft] systems that are being prototyped right now,” he said. “Right now, I could take a credit card to Best Buy and buy a Chinese-made drone, and as a consumer, I own the airspace from zero to 400 feet. I don’t need clearance; I don’t need to request permission from air traffic control.”
For service members, Ecelbarger said, the barriers for drone flight training are much higher because they are contending with military airspace deconfliction; frequency approvals; long certification processes; and policies that put drones in the same category as bigger aircraft, rather than something that is as expendable as a round of .556.
“We need to start thinking about UAS as rounds and not aircraft,” Maj. Gen. Jason Woodworth, head of Marine Corps Installations Command, said earlier this month.
Another challenge is getting parts and integrating training — and the service is working toward making it scalable. In a shop on Quantico earlier this month, Marine Corps machinists were toiling away at drone parts, soldering circuit boards and fixing wings onto support structures that would soon carry them buzzing into the air.
Holding up a drone he had built, Gunnery Sgt. Gregory Brown said that three weeks beforehand he “didn’t know a single thing about soldering electronics and configuring radio telemetry,” but was now “pretty confident that I can turn around and teach this skill to Marines to support our drone effort.”
Currently, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit has issued a “blue list” of companies — and therefore parts — meant to help the military choose “winners” in the drone game, Ecelbarger said. However, “it does leave a lot of room for emerging technologies” in an industry that changes so quickly, where a new prototype could be outpaced before it even gets to production.
“It’s the question of should warfighters wait until something is on the blue list and it rolls over, maybe to a program of record in order to just start training on the tech that is emerging?” he said. “Because our adversaries are going to use [drones] whether it’s on the list or not.”
Pointing to the drones the Marines had built, Brown said “these were built for about $200-$300, it can do pretty much anything that we want it to do, and I can upgrade it. The catch is that this is made out of mostly Chinese components, because it was cheap and it’s readily available, commercial.”
He added that to keep compliant with current regulations, it would cost just under $1,000 to build, “which is still considered much cheaper than the alternative, which is many thousands of dollars.”
On a range outside, the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team demonstrated its capability with a “blue list” approved Neros Archer first-person view drone, flying it out to a notional enemy machine gun emplacement and then sending another to drop its payload onto the target.
“It’s a simple $2,000 for the system,” Cuomo said after the demonstration, comparing it to the cost effectiveness and utility of the Javelin anti-tank missile system, where one round can cost upward of $200,000 with a range of 2,500 kilometers. This drone can reach upward of 15 kilometers, for a fraction of the cost and with anti-personnel, anti-materiel and anti-armor payloads, Cuomo said.
The service hopes to get scalable drone capabilities down to the squad level, and infrastructure around that effort, such as bolstering military occupational specialties toward drone users, is already underway.
“If they had a kinetic payload, they could just extend the range of a rifle squad times somewhere around 15 or 20,” Cuomo added.
The Marine Corps hopes to mirror the development of the drone team after its tried and true history of marksmanship, specifically with the Marine Corps Shooting Team, which falls under Cuomo’s command at Quantico.
So, it was not surprising when Cuomo recounted the landmark events at the Weapons Training Battalion earlier this month in a brief to senior service officials and Marines in a room that showcased the service’s marksmanship excellence, lined with walls depicting crackshot marksmen over the last 100-plus years.
He outlined the two-fold mission of the drone team: First, putting a team together and building expertise. The second part is much more complicated: Making the effort scalable across the Marine Corps. Like its efforts on drone proliferation, the service, now widely known for its fanatical reverence for marksmanship, was not always the best at shooting.
“In 1899, our ninth commandant said we weren’t very good at marksmanship,” Cuomo said. “We had about 6,000 Marines in the Corps at the time; 80 of them were qualified in any way shape or form. So in 1901, he created a shooting team.”
More than 100 years later, the service is relying on that method to develop expertise and create policy, manuals and training events to use drone technology on future battlefields, as well as imbue the systems into the Marine Corps in a way that changes the culture around it.
“How did we get good? How did we establish a culture of every Marine a rifleman?” Cuomo said. “Because we took the best shooters in the Corps, and we brought them all here.”
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