Brig. Gen. Travis McIntosh, the 101st Airborne Division’s deputy commander for support, holds an Attritable Battlefield Enabler at Fort Campbell, Ky., on Oct. 6, 2025. ABEs are small, $750 battlefield drones that are flown by an operator wearing a headset and can conduct reconnaissance or drop small munitions. But the drones are limited by their software and the manpower required to operate them, McIntosh says. (Parris Kersey/U.S. Army)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has worked with drones for decades, but its adoption of the unmanned systems lags behind the innovations other armies have made on current battlefields such as eastern Ukraine, top generals warned.

“We’re behind,” admitted Army Lt. Gen. Charlie Costanza, the commander of the Army’s Poland-based V Corps, to a crowd at the service’s annual Association of the U.S. Army Conference last week in Washington. “I’ll just be candid. … We aren’t moving fast enough. And it really took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the way they’re innovating and [the] Ukrainians are innovating to realize, ‘Hey, we need to go fast.’ ”

From the Pacific to Poland, U.S. Army units have studied drone warfare innovations in recent conflicts, initially by Armenian and Azerbaijani forces during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 and further by Ukrainian forces and their Russian invaders since 2022. But Costanza — and more than a dozen other top Army officials — warned that the Army’s clunky, outdated weapons procurement process, which can take years to produce new equipment, is not good enough to keep up with the blistering rate of technological advancement in current drone warfare.

Many of those innovations have come as soldiers find new ways to survive in an existential fight, like Ukraine has faced, officials said.

“War does that,” Costanza said. “It forces you to be innovative and move quick. We are picking up on that, but we’re not moving quite as fast as I think we need to.”

Drones by Mistral on display on the AUSA exhibition floor on Oct. 15, 2025 in Washington. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

Costanza, whose V Corps oversees U.S. Army forces operating in Europe and would become NATO’s primary counterattack force if Europe was invaded, made the comments against the backdrop of the AUSA convention’s trade room floor, where hundreds of companies displayed their latest drones and robotics capable of finding and attacking enemy positions, often enabled with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. The Army, meanwhile, is modernizing its procurement apparatus to work together with those companies to adopt their technology quickly — often bringing the companies along on field exercises to work hand-in-hand with soldiers to improve their products.

The Army has worked in recent months to outfit several of its brigades with small drones — some built in part by soldiers — to experiment with how to incorporate them into their formations to scout or attack enemy locations. Army officials envision a near-term future where every size unit, from squads to divisions, in every specialty — from front-line fighters in the infantry and armor fields to supply, intelligence and communications forces — is equipped with autonomous drones.

In Hawaii, the 25th Infantry Division’s brigades have spent recent months converting from Infantry Brigade Combat Teams to the new Mobile Brigade Combat Team platform, which includes new electronic warfare capabilities, more drones and a new artillery battalion outfitted with the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, that have proven critical to Ukraine’s defenses.

The division has been sending teams of soldiers to Europe to study the latest advancements in Ukraine to adapt those tactics to their primary mission to prepare to fight a conflict in the Indo-Pacific Command theater, perhaps against a near-peer adversary such as China. Like Army units in Europe, the 25th ID has worked quickly this year to adopt the latest tech and let its soldiers find innovative ways to use it, said Maj. Gen. Jay Bartholomees, the Schofield Barracks-based division’s commander.

Soldiers from the 25th ID have held more than 70 experiments aimed at integrating drones and other new capabilities into their formations in recent months. They’ve found successes in incorporating short- and medium-range drones into their smaller units, but Bartholomees agreed with Costanza that they lagged behind in other areas — including in the ability to use drones to find or strike targets at long-range distances beyond about 40 kilometers (25 miles).

“That is where we’re behind,” Bartholomees told reporters. “Now, the good news is I think we can catch up very rapidly by learning from … what is happening in Ukraine, and the formations that we have built are ready for those capabilities to land.”

He said his division would love a capability like the Iranian-built Shahed-136 long-range suicide drones the Russians have been pounding Ukraine with for the past two years. At some $20,000 to $50,000 per drone, the Shaheds are relatively cheap — in comparison to traditional missiles that can cost more than $1 million each — fixed-wing drones that carry explosive warheads and can fly some 1,500 miles.

Iranian Shahed-136 drones are prepared for launch in this undated photo. The Air Force is looking to acquire replicas of the inexpensive model produced by Iran and used extensively in the Russia-Ukraine war. (U.S. Army)

“We absolutely need to build this capability quickly,” Bartholomees said. “The Shahed is very cheap, easy to produce and easy to put together.”

Army leaders are also looking for another new capability to adopt across their forces, said Brig. Gen. Travis McIntosh, the 101st Airborne Division’s deputy commander for support. McIntosh wants drones that understand what he calls “commander’s intent.” That is, drones that will seamlessly respond to what a commander orders them to do, just as good soldiers would.

Like the 25th Infantry Division, the 101st at Fort Campbell, Ky., has spent this year transforming its brigades into Mobile Brigade Combat Teams and adopting the Army’s newest technology.

As part of those efforts, its soldiers built their own first-person-view drone systems called Attributable Battlefield Enablers — small, about $750 battlefield drones that are flown by an operator wearing a headset and can conduct reconnaissance or drop small munitions. But the drones are limited by their software and the manpower required to operate them, McIntosh said.

The 101st-built drones need at least four soldiers to operate, he said. One soldier to fly the drone, another to provide security and two others to manage equipment and antennas.

“It’s a four to one ratio, ladies and gentlemen, and that’s the wrong math,” McIntosh told an audience at AUSA, imploring the many technology companies in attendance to build him software that allows the drones to “fly by command, not by pilot.”

The 101st general said he has already tested drones that can respond to his voice in training at Fort Campbell, where he told a three-drone team to fly 200 feet and follow his vehicle, but he wants manufacturers to “take it to the next level.”

McIntosh said he needs drones that seamlessly respond to commands such as, “conduct reconnaissance west of my position for 2 kilometers, and report.” And he wants those drones to be able to advise him if they detect the need for a “lethal response.”

“When your drones can understand commander’s intent that, ladies and gentlemen, is the threshold for AI and autonomy to help us,” he said. “I need to command drones like a platoon, like a battalion.”