Hope Hodge Seck
On the heels of fielding the military’s first attack drone team, the U.S. Marine Corps added another weapon to their drone-fighting arsenal: a 90-page handbook all about employing small, unmanned aerial systems against the enemy and integrating them into formations. The 1st Marine Division Schools’ Small UAS/Counter-small UAS Integration Handbook was published in June and approved for public release. It’s intended to support the 10-day sUAS/C-sUAS Integration Course recently launched at Camp Pendleton, which expects to see a throughput of about 400 students by the end of the year, according to a report from USNI News.
A foreword to the handbook is signed by Lt. Col. Nick Freeman, director of 1st Marine Division Schools, and co-signed by two first lieutenants leading the drone integration and signature management courses. It emphasizes that the handbook will be updated and rewritten often to keep up with evolving capabilities and practices.The book “is not a general reference on broader aspects of sUAS-related equipping, organisation, and training. Instead, it synthesizes lessons learned and best practices from across the 1st Marine Division and elsewhere to provide basic considerations and ‘how to.
“In doing so, this guide also develops and seeks to standardize common sUAS procedures for the infantry, fires, reconnaissance, and aviation units that will operate together with this capability.” The manual’s publication comes amid a clear shift in defense priorities to favor drone warfare and emphasize, in particular, proficiency with “first-person view” or “one-way attack” small drones designed to pack a lethal punch. In addition to the fielding of the Marine Corps’ Attack Drone Team, a small group of troops who will develop ways to employ these kinds of drones and integrate them into formations,
the Pentagon in July announced a slate of changes to drone acquisition designed to “establish UAS dominance” by 2027. The Marines’ new Attack Drone Team is tackling the challenge of turning drones into weapons. And they want to get more personnel in on the action By Hope Hodge Seck It’s a marked pivot from previous years, in which the services largely emphasized surveillance and logistics as the role of friendly, small drones in warfare and lacked a definitive approach to defending against hostile attack drones. In 2020, a small group of infantry Marines crowdsourced an unofficial standard operating procedure for camouflaging small units from drone surveillance, underscoring the ad-hoc nature of efforts to account for this threat.
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