MATTHEW M. BURKE STARS AND STRIPES
Helicopters assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division take flight in formation June 10, 2025, at Fort Bragg, N.C., for a celebration of the Army’s 250th birthday. The service plans to cut thousands of active-duty aviation jobs, including Black Hawk and Apache pilots and aircrews. (Kamar Williams/U.S. Army) Thousands of Army aviation jobs will be eliminated in line with the service’s ongoing switch to a force that brings lots of savvy with drones and other autonomous systems to the battlefield. The Army will cut 6,500 active-duty positions in 2026 and 2027, more than 20% of the approximately 30,000 maintainers, flight crews and pilots in the aviation ranks, Army spokesman Maj. Montrell Russell said this week. “We won’t see a time where there will be no crewed systems,” Russell said.
“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, we don’t need pilots.’ That is not the takeaway from the policy right now.” The growing dependence on offensive and defensive drone technology emerged from the Russia-Ukraine war and has since been integrated into U.S. Army doctrine through modernization initiatives dubbed Transforming in Contact and Project Flytrap. The 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Vilseck, Germany, and 173rd Airborne Brigade units in Germany and Italy have been at the forefront of the service’s European testing and development of the concepts. As part of the restructuring, the Army plans to convene “talent panels” starting in October to decide which soldiers will remain or transfer to other specialties, Army Human Resources Command said in an administrative message Wednesday.
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