“This technological leap demands a parallel evolution in military command and control culture to redefine expectations, moving beyond dystopian fears of intractable machine autonomy to embrace a more realistic future wherein human-machine teaming maximizes tactical authority, operational integrity, and strategic dominance.”
[Editor’s Note: The contemporary Operational Environment is replete with examples of how battlefield autonomous weapons systems are transforming combat operations. According to ABC News, Russia launched a record number of 6,245 Long Range (LR) One-Way Attack (OWA) and decoy Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) against Ukrainian targets during the month of July 2025. During the evening of 06-07 September 2025, Russia launched its largest UAV strike of the war, firing 805 drones against Ukraine. Several expert sources speculate that Russia may may soon be able to launch two thousand LR OWA UAVs per day. In addition to supporting LR strikes, Russia and Ukraine are employing drones for tactical precision strikes, intercepting other UAVs in a C-UAS capacity, performing Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) and directing fires, relaying command and control signals to extend the range of tactical UAVs and delivering them deeper via “mothership” UAVs, providing battlefield logistics support, emplacing and clearing mines, and conducting demolition operations against fixed defenses. With the integration of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Vision into these autonomous systems, we have recently seen the advent of true swarming strikes.
These battlefield successes have led to drone technologies being rapidly adopted and proliferated around the globe, with Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCO) now also employing them for their nefarious activities — per the Wall Street Journal, a Columbian UH-60 police helicopter was downed by drug-trafficking militia using a UAV on 21 August 2025, killing 12 police officers. Since the first UAV strike in Columbia in April 2024, 301 UAV strikes have occurred, killing 22 Columbian soldiers and policemen.
While the U.S. was the first nation to embrace the use of unmanned systems several decades ago, it has been slow to transform how it uses these capabilities for warfighting. Until recently, these coveted, exquisite systems tended to be judiciously employed as national assets supporting critical missions. That all changed on 10 July 2025 when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced his initiative — Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance.
Today’s timely post — by returning guest bloggers Dr. James Giordano and Elise Annett, and joined by John Bitterman — explores how the United States can rapidly harness this transformative capability, providing us with a roadmap for Secretary Hegseth’s vision — “unleashing the combined potential of American manufacturing and warfighter ingenuity.” Read on to learn how we could “set the stage for next-generation autonomous systems.”]
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent call for an aggressive overhaul of the military’s drone strategy emphasizes modernization, deregulation, and accelerated production. This explicitly communicates recognition that semi-autonomous and autonomous systems are now central to kinetic and non-kinetic engagements across domains. More than a mere technological imperative, this strategic pivot can be seen as a defined shift in the character of war itself.
The use of Unmanned Vehicular Systems (UVS), including expendable drones, has increased significantly over the past two decades. Recent conflicts have served as empirical laboratories for testing the effectiveness of kamikaze drones, loitering munitions, drone swarms and the use of small consumer-grade UVS that can be weaponized with minimal technical effort, economic investment, and time. Drone use in precision strikes against high-value targets, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) and electronic warfare missions have all demonstrated the versatility and multidimensional cost-effectiveness of these expendable platforms.
Directed Swarming in UVSs
The current state of UVS emphasizes directed swarming, where drones are designed for specialized tasks—such as ISR, precision strikes, or maritime patrolling—and synchronized to achieve mission objectives in coordination with human operators. Unlike a universal platform, each UVS, whether air, 
land, or sea-based, excels in specific roles, drawing from commercial innovations like targeted agricultural drones or delivery systems. Recent reports highlight Russia’s ambition to deploy up to 2,000 drones per mission, underscoring the need for robust command, control, communications, and cybersecurity (C4) to ensure task-specific drones operate cohesively without compromising mission integrity. This directed swarming approach, rooted in human-machine teaming, enables scalable multidimensional effects but demands advanced cybersecurity to counter adversary interference, setting the stage for next-generation autonomous systems.
Decision-Making Technology: From Prescriptive to Autopoietic Systems
Today’s UVS rely on prescriptive decision-making technologies, where systems execute tightly defined instructions within engineered constraints, such as pre-programmed flight paths or swarm coordination protocols. These rigid frameworks ensure reliability but limit adaptability in dynamic battlefields. Looking forward, we posit that Defense Secretary Hegseth’s vision demands autopoietic systems [i.e., self-organizing and self-reproducing systems that can perform cognitive work autonomously] — capable of self-evolving decision-making and adapting to threats while remaining subordinate to human supremacy. Such systems would use advanced AI to anticipate adversary tactics and optimize operations, yet incorporate an architecture of responsibility to align with human intent, particularly for critical actions like weapons release. Developing these technologies requires investment in machine-learning algorithms and cybersecurity to protect against exploitation, ensuring that UVS evolve predictably with human oversight.
Rare Earth Minerals: From Permissive Access to Self-Reliance
The production of UVS currently benefits from a relatively permissive environment for accessing rare earth minerals (REMs), critical for components 
like magnets and sensors. However, China’s control of approximately 80% of global REM supply poses a strategic vulnerability, threatening supply chain stability for UVS manufacturing. To support Secretary Hegseth’s call for accelerated production, future technologies must reduce dependence on foreign REMs through domestic extraction, such as expanding U.S. mines like Mountain Pass, and advancing recycling methods to reclaim materials from end-of-life systems. These efforts, combined with innovations in alternative materials and energy-efficient designs like energy harvesting, will ensure a resilient UVS supply chain, safeguarding long-term operational scalability.
Strategically Plausible Deniability
Expendable drones offer unique advantages in operations where attribution and escalation management are critical. Their easy and rapid deployability and small signature allow for deniability in surveillance, probing attack, and strike missions. Such ambiguity of attribution may afford tactical flexibility and strategic advantage. This has already been exploited by state actors (e.g., Iran) that have equipped proxy forces with drones to conduct attacks on oil facilities, shipping lanes, and coalition bases without direct attribution. As the United States embraces broader drone use, it will be important to anticipate how adversaries will employ the same technologies to create strategic narrative advantage and distort escalation ladders. To be sure, the use of drones with low attribution signatures can thicken the “fog of war,” fuel mistrust, cloud accountability and strain international norms of engagement and rectitude and proportionality of response.
Navigating the Fog of Drone Warfare: Enhancing Decision-Making and Countermeasures
To pierce the fog of drone warfare, the U.S. must enhance predictive intelligence and refine autonomous decision-making in UVS while preserving human intent through integrative command and control. Advanced predictive analytics, leveraging artificial intelligence to model adversarial UVS tactics—such as Iran’s use of proxy drones for deniable strikes—can anticipate threats and reduce ambiguity in attribution. To time- and cost-effectively and -efficiently develop such systems, we believe that U.S. scaling decision cycles should entail greater flexibility to more realistically accommodate the need for hybrid (human-machine) systems’ designs, construction, and evaluation for operational use. This hybrid approach should engage automation (and iterative autonomy) for rapid data processing and swarm coordination, while retaining human oversight of fire control in kinetic actions to ensure alignment with both tactical specificity and strategic objectives. To sustain clarity and mission capability in contested environments, robust counter-drone technologies should be developed, including real-time signal disruption and attribution forensics, to neutralize adversaries’ UVS and mitigate their tactical advantage.
“Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be in peril.” Sun Tzu
To enact Secretary Hegseth’s vision for UVS, the U.S. must advance DARPA’s autopoietic, self-evolving platforms, transitioning first from human-in-the-loop to human-on-the-loop architectures, where humans oversee rather than directly control systems’ functions, and eventually to symbiotic human-machine teaming that entails dynamic partnerships wherein UVS anticipate and adapt to human intent with minimal intervention. Steps toward such modernization in both technology, and systems’ integration and application(s) will require investment in agile small companies to develop innovative components and software, which can be paired with directed enterprises by traditional defense contractors to scale production and navigate Pentagon regulations, while securing domestic REM to counter adversaries’ control of critical resources. An architecture of responsibility must ensure that autopoietic UVS operate predictably, reducing cognitive burden through AI-driven analytics and fostering trust in cyber-secure systems. This technological leap demands a parallel evolution in military command and control culture to redefine expectations, moving beyond dystopian fears of intractable machine autonomy to embrace a more realistic future wherein human-machine teaming maximizes tactical authority, operational integrity, and strategic dominance.
If you enjoyed this post, check out the TRADOC Pamphlet 525-92, The Operational Environment 2024-2034: Large-Scale Combat Operations
Explore the TRADOC G-2‘s Operational Environment Enterprise web page, brimming with authoritative information on the Operational Environment and how our adversaries fight, including:
Our China Landing Zone, full of information regarding our pacing challenge, including ATP 7-100.3, Chinese Tactics, How China Fights in Large-Scale Combat Operations, BiteSize China weekly topics, and the People’s Liberation Army Ground Forces Quick Reference Guide.
Our Russia Landing Zone, including How Russia Fights in Large-Scale Combat Operations and the BiteSize Russia weekly topics. If you have a CAC, you’ll be especially interested in reviewing our weekly RUS-UKR Conflict Running Estimates and associated Narratives, capturing what we learned about the contemporary Russian way of war in Ukraine over the past two years and the ramifications for U.S. Army modernization across DOTMLPF-P.
Our Iran Landing Zone, including the Iran Quick Reference Guide and the Iran Passive Defense Manual (both require a CAC to access).
Our North Korea Landing Zone, including Resources for Studying North Korea, Instruments of Chinese Military Influence in North Korea, and Instruments of Russian Military Influence in North Korea.
Our Irregular Threats Landing Zone, including TC 7-100.3, Irregular Opposing Forces, and ATP 3-37.2, Antiterrorism (requires a CAC to access).
Our Running Estimates SharePoint site (also requires a CAC to access) — documenting what we’re learning about the evolving OE. Contains our monthly OE Running Estimates, associated Narratives, and the quarterly OE Assessment TRADOC Intelligence Posts (TIPs).
Then review the following related TRADOC G-2 and Mad Scientist Laboratory content:
Adaptation… Ukraine Conflict’s UAV Evolution, by Colin Christopher
Do Androids Dream of Electric War: The Reality of Autonomous Weapons and associated podcast, with Dr. Mark Bailey
On the Ground and In the Air in Ukraine, and associated podcast with Wolfgang Hagarty
Insights from Ukraine on the Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Warfare
Learning from LSCO: Applying Lessons to Irregular Conflict, by Ian Sullivan and Kate Kilgore
Asymmetric Warfare across Multiple Domains, by Ethan Sah
“Own the Night,” as well as Former Deputy Secretary of Defense and proclaimed Mad Scientist Mr. Bob Work‘s presentation from the Disruption and the Future Operational Environment Conference on AI and Future Warfare: The Rise of the Robots (and Army Futures Command), and his Modern War Institute podcast assessing the future battlefield.
Unmanned Capabilities in Today’s Battlespace
Revolutionizing 21st Century Warfighting: UAVs and C-UAS
Death From Above! The Evolution of sUAS Technology and associated podcast, with COL Bill Edwards (USA-Ret.)
The Operational Environment’s Increased Lethality
Top Attack: Lessons Learned from the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and associated podcast, with proclaimed Mad Scientist COL John Antal (USA-Ret.)
Jomini’s Revenge: Mass Strikes Back! by proclaimed Mad Scientist Zachery Tyson Brown
Insights from the Robotics and Autonomy Series of Virtual Events, as well as all of the associated webinar content (presenter biographies, slide decks, and notes) and associated videos
Through Soldiers’ Eyes: The Future of Ground Combat and its associated podcast
The PLA and UAVs – Automating the Battlefield and Enhancing Training
A Chinese Perspective on Future Urban Unmanned Operations
China: “New Concepts” in Unmanned Combat and Cyber and Electronic Warfare
The PLA: Close Combat in the Information Age and the “Blade of Victory”
“Once More unto The Breach Dear Friends”: From English Longbows to Azerbaijani Drones, Army Modernization STILL Means More than Materiel, by Ian Sullivan.
About the Authors:
John Bitterman (CDR, USCG, ret.) is a Non-resident Research Fellow of the Center for Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Washington, DC.
Elise Annett is the Institutional Research, Assessment, and Accreditation Associate at the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, National Defense University; and is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. Her work addresses operational and ethical issues of iteratively autonomous AI systems in military use.
Proclaimed Mad Scientist Dr. James Giordano is the Director of the Center for Disruptive Technology and Future Warfare of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Washington, DC.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Defense, National Defense University, Department of the Army, Army Futures Command (AFC), or Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
