An AEVEX Atlas III takes flight at Joint Base Lewis-McChord during tests in August 2025. (Matthew Ryan/U.S. Army)

JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. — “America’s First Corps” was the first to get its hands on a new multipurpose drone system the Army has fast-tracked to deploy with all Army divisions by the end of 2026.

Teams of soldiers in late August double-timed through a three-week course with simulators and then in the field at a remote part of the sprawling 86,000-acre Pacific Northwest base shared by the Army and Air Force.

The drones are dubbed “LE-SR” for “Launched Effects — Short-Range.” Towed or trucked to the battlefield or fired from helicopters, the “effects” refer to multiple roles the payload can play.

“Non-lethal effects” include unmanned reconnaissance, communications and enemy signal jamming. With “lethal effects,” the payload is a warhead, and the drone swoops, loops or spirals down to explode on enemy command posts or troop concentrations, or it knocks out radar and air defenses to clear the way for manned attack aircraft.

“We can push further, faster into more restricted terrain because we know we can use the scout drone to know what’s ahead of us,” said 1st Lt. Zach Glenn of the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. “And we can also use the attack drones with information from the scout to eliminate the enemy assets at up to a 70-nautical-mile range.”

“Launched Effects” is one of several drone initiatives, from unmanned drone “wingmen” for future Air Force fighter jets to uncrewed surface ships and submersible drones for the Navy.

The goal is to buy or build “first-person-view” or “kamikaze” drones that can be carried, launched and controlled by a single soldier.

“The United States is lagging behind, and the gap is growing,” Army Col. Neil Hollenbeck, an assistant chief of staff for NATO Rapid Deployable Corps-Türkiye, wrote in the U.S. Army’s September issue of Military Review.

Hollenbeck said the war in Ukraine showed how short-lived an advantage in drone technology can be. With each innovation by Ukraine or Russia, the other side quickly found weaknesses, adapted and now they are shooting down swarms of drones.

“In the first two years of the war, drone warfare went through four evolutions of tactics and technology,” Hollenbeck wrote. “Today, the innovation cycle for drones in Ukraine is closer to three months.”

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll and Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Randy A. George wrote in May that the service needed to abandon obsolete technology and move quickly on drones and counter-drone technology.

“Adaptation is no longer an advantage — it’s a requirement for survival,” Driscoll and George wrote.

An AEVEX Atlas III System was one of three Launch Effects systems tested at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. (AEVEX)

The Pentagon wants to deploy weapons on the battlefield significantly faster than the current years-long development process, from concept to prototype to production. That timeline that doesn’t include training soldiers to use the weapons, or the logistics of how to get them deployed worldwide.

The Army plans to test several types of existing and planned drones in a continuous feedback loop between what the defense industry produces and what soldiers want. The back-and-forth iteration will inform changes in the choices for new and future drones.

The new “Launched Effects” drones are being designed so that most soldiers can use the systems without being designated as experts. Eventually, modular controllers and launchers will be developed so that any soldier can use an LE at any time. Troops taking part at Lewis-McChord included a Stryker battalion, helicopter crews and infantry units.

“What’s hard for people in the Army to visualize is what the next fight looks like,” said Lt. Col. Michael Wallace, commander of 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. “These soldiers are walking point on what comes next.”

The Lewis-McChord training and simulation was designed to test the platforms for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. The teams set up launch plans and strike targets about 3 to 4 miles out, and the drones crossed different terrains.

A battery of launch tubes for the Raytheon Coyote Block 3 Launch Effects drones are set up up at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. (Matthew Ryan/U.S. Army)

Soldiers put into place a portable Anduril Altius 600 LE system to the staging area at Joint Based Lewis-McChord in Washington. (Matthew Ryan/U.S. Army)

The Army teams fielded three systems. Raytheon’s Coyote Block III drone flew from a rectangular launcher; Anduril Industries’ Altius 600 was fired from three long tubes; and the Atlas system by AEVEX Aerospace flung silver glider-like fuselages skyward with compressed air.

When announcing the Army’s priority changes April 30, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he wants development and testing to coincide to increase the speed of production — even if there are bumps along the way.

And there were some bumps: The first Raytheon Coyote Block III failed to deploy its wings fully on launch and spun into nearby pine trees. A second Raytheon round put into a launch fared worse, plopping out of the launcher and nosediving into thick brush, igniting a fire of several acres that required a response from a base firefighting team and put more launches on hold.

The system did execute a successful launch late in the day, officials said. The other two systems flew successfully the following day.

Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, director of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift-Cross Functional Team, based at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., said the program would have moments where things didn’t work as planned.

“When you have a mis-launch, or you have something where it doesn’t perform correctly, we have to learn from that, right?” Baker said. “At the end of the day, we had a lot more successes than we had failures.”

Baker said getting the systems into the field for I Corps to fly, then incorporating their ideas into design changes invests the soldiers in the system’s rapid development.

“When you bring a capability out to the field and you put it in the hands of soldiers, and you get the feedback that they really want it and they like it, and they need it — that is the biggest accelerator that I can have,” Baker said.