Army Spc. Dylan Eisenbach, an infantryman from the 25th Infantry Division, prepares a C100 drone to fly during the hunter-killer portion of the Army’s inaugural Best Drone Warrior Competition in Huntsville, Ala., on Feb. 19, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Two small quadcopter drones buzzed between a pair of shipping containers, around a bend and through a purple obstacle heading toward the homestretch of the race. Then they collided.
The impact sent one of the Neros Archer drones crashing to the ground on the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s drone test range, while the pilot of the other Archer, Army Sgt. Javon Purchner, maintained control and sent his first-person-view drone swooping through the doors of a Humvee and racing on to the finish line. The win in the final race Thursday of the Army’s inaugural Best Drone Warrior Competition earned the 22-year-old artillery forward observer from the 1st Cavalry Division the first-ever title of Army Best Drone Operator.
The first-of-its kind Army event was meant to evaluate soldiers’ current capabilities with the small drones that are becoming increasingly important to how the U.S. military plans to conduct combat operations, competition organizers said. It also aimed to identify areas where those soldiers and the drones themselves need improvement in a fun setting far from the battlefield.
“I’m still processing it,” Purchner, with a wide grin, said of the accomplishment moments after the race’s conclusion as he was high-fived and hugged by fellow Fort Hood, Texas, soldiers.
But it almost did not happen. With the best-of-three final tied at one win apiece, Purchner’s drone took off at the start of the would-be decisive race and smashed at full speed into a metal cargo container, breaking into dozens of pieces. The sergeant immediately threw his hands up, explaining that he had no control of the drone.
Army Sgt. Javon Purchner, of the 1st Cavalry Division, flashes a smile moments after winning the final race of the service’s first-ever Best Drone Warrior Competition to be named the Army’s best drone operator on Feb. 19, 2026. The competition, held in Huntsville, Ala., saw more than 200 soldiers compete in three drone-related events. Purchner, a 22-year-old artillery forward observer, won a series of races of Neros Archer FPV drones. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
“I thought everyone was going to think that was me messing up as a pilot,” he said. “And it was really just that we were having a little bit of interference down there. But after that, once we started up again, I just flew my race, and that was it.”
The interference issues were among many other problems that plagued the competitors over the course of the three-day event. Rain slowed the competition because some drones had exposed electronics. Environmental factors jammed communications. Other drones proved inefficient in tactical conditions, and dozens crashed — into each other, obstacles and the ground — over hours of competition.
But that was not necessarily a bad thing, said Army Col. Nicholas Ryan, who led planning for the drone warfare event. Those problems provided Army planners with a clearer picture of the technology and training gaps its soldiers currently face in the emerging field of small drone warfare, which has become a dominant aspect in recent conflicts, especially in Ukraine.
Like other Army-wide competitions the service has held for decades, Ryan said, the new tournament was meant to bring together troops to share their latest tactics, innovations and knowledge about small drones and to discover the remaining capability gaps across the service.
“At the end of the day, it’s not about receiving trophies or awards, it is about what lessons can we take from this to find out who the best operator is and how they became the best operator,” said Ryan, a career CH-47 Chinook pilot who has spent recent years studying the implementation of small drones into Army combat planning as the director of unmanned aerial systems transformation at Fort Rucker, Ala. “What skills and resources and training allowed them to become the best operator? Who’s doing some amazing innovation out there across the Army that we can take and see what kind of innovation — like grassroots soldier-level innovation — is happening, that we can then take and scale across the entire Army … to make the Army the most dominant drone force in the world.”
Planners decided in August that a new competition would help the Army implement a series of drone-based executive orders and guidance issued by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth aimed at “unleashing drone dominance,” Ryan said.
The service has used competition to test new skills and tactics since the Revolutionary War. Each year, competitors across the Army compete to determine the service’s best Rangers, Sappers, snipers, mortar units, medics and combat squads. Why not build something similar to find its best small drone users? Ryan said.
Officials decided to test Army drone operators’ skills across three separate competitions built into the event: a drone racing competition to find the best operator; a two-man hunter-killer lane to find the best tactical squad; and a “Shark Tank”-like innovation competition to find the most innovative ideas.
Planners opened all the competitions to soldiers from across any military occupational specialty in the regular Army, National Guard and Reserves, including special operators.
In the Best Drone Operators competition, won by Purchner, competitors completed timed laps on their own to build a bracket before a series of head-to-head races determined the winner. All the competitors were provided Neros Archer drones to fly in the competition so that everyone had the same platforms, Ryan said. The UAH drone test course provided a track with multiple obstacles set up to resemble an urban environment to navigate the drones using a video game-like remote control and first-person-view goggles.
In the innovation competition, teams submitted a white paper, conducted a 15-minute pitch to a panel of judges and conducted a flight test, according to the Army.
A pair of Neros Archer FPV drones controlled by U.S. soldiers race through a Humvee on an obstacle course in the final race of the Army’s first-ever Best Drone Warrior Competition on Feb. 19, 2026. The competition was held at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s drone test range and run by the Army Aviation Center of Excellence. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A Neros Archer FPV drone controlled by an Army Best Drone Warrior competition soldier flies through an obstacle course on the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s drone test range on Feb. 19, 2026, during the service’s first competition to find its best drone flying troops. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A Neros Archer FPV drone controlled by an Army Best Drone Warrior competition soldier flies through an obstacle course on the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s drone test range on Feb. 19, 2026, during the service’s first competition to find its best drone flying troops. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A Neros Archer FPV drone controlled by an Army Best Drone Warrior competition soldier flies through an obstacle course on the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s drone test range on Feb. 19, 2026, during the service’s first competition to find its best drone flying troops. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A Pennsylvania Army National Guard Team from the 28th Infantry Division — 1st Lt. Ryan Giallonardo; Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Reed; Chief Warrant Officer 2 Nathan Shea; and Sgt. 1st Class Brent Wehr — took the top prize. Their innovation, dubbed Project R.E.D. (for recovery exploitation drone), used an AI-enabled drone to identify downed enemy or friendly drones and recover them with a 3D-printed carbon fiber claw arm.
Meanwhile, the hunter-killer competition proved the trickiest. Most teams failed to complete the 45-minute exercise to conduct strikes on five targets. The two-man teams were instructed to camouflage themselves and their equipment, conduct a five-minute physical session that included dragging a 145-pound dummy, overhead-pressing water cans and walking with weight before beginning a 1,000-meter hike toward their drone engagements carrying all their equipment, according to the Army.
A 30-minute timer to complete the five strikes by flying their self-selected offensive drones to a target started as teams embarked on the hike, leaving them with a short time to set up their drones, scout five targets with a surveillance drone and then attack.
A team from the Vilseck, Germany-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment, Staff Sgt. Angel Caliz and Spc. Jonah Burks, won that competition and proved one of the few teams able to hit targets.
Army Sgt. 1st Class Jose Morua, who teaches small drone operations to new soldiers at Fort Benning and helped run the competition, said teams that were successful had mastered the basics of flying drones, showed they were in good physical condition and kept their efforts simple.
The hunter-killer lane best mimicked the conditions front-line troops face in combat in Ukraine, he said. It showed that the U.S. Army is “a little bit behind” on small drone capabilities and must work quickly to improve.
Most of the teams were not completing the hike quick enough to give themselves time to complete the drone attacks, Morua said. Many teams, he said, struggled with their equipment before getting it in the air. Others, he said, got their drones in the air, but struggled to communicate properly to find and attack the targets.
“It just pretty much boiled down to operator and basic fundamentals of knowing the equipment, and that’s been the common issue these last two days,” said Morua, an infantryman who saw combat in Afghanistan.
The sergeant called the event “an eye opener,” because so many capable teams struggled with so many different issues.
The equipment and communications issues were among the more concerning lessons learned for planners, Ryan said. As a career helicopter pilot, communicating in the air is instilled into you from practically Day 1, but it clearly did not come so naturally to soldiers who have spent their careers on the ground.
“We’re seeing that kind of a breakdown in that communication because they haven’t been trained in that — in Army Aviation, we call that crew coordination — where two people in a helicopter are talking to each other, explaining what they’re seeing, what they’re doing, and what they need the other person to be doing,” Ryan said. “We’re seeing that breakdown happen up there that we never anticipated, but it’s definitely something that … standing out as something we as an Army need to do better on if we’re going to proliferate these drones and want them to be more effective and lethal.”
Army Spc. Dylan Eisenbach, an infantryman from the 25th Infantry Division, lugs a rucksack with homemade first-person-view attack drones mounted on the outside during the hunter-killer portion of the Army’s inaugural Best Drone Warrior Competition in Huntsville, Ala., on Feb. 19, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Army Spc. Dylan Eisenbach, left, and Staff Sgt. Andres Garcia, of the 25th Infantry Division, hike 1,000 meters during the hunter-killer portion of the Army’s inaugural Best Drone Warrior Competition in Huntsville, Ala., on Feb. 19, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
One team in the hunter-killer competition also found it needed to ensure its equipment was more resilient. The 25th Infantry Division team of Staff Sgt. Andres Garcia and Spc. Dylan Eisenbach managed to get their C100 surveillance drone airborne but could not fly their homemade, 3D-printed, first-person-view attack drones because a piece of their controller broke during the mission.
Garcia said they had tested everything at their home station in Hawaii and during training in the Philippines and came to the competition feeling “super confident.” He said they were able to locate all five targets, but after discovering a sensitive pin in the FPV drone controller had bent, the team had no way to fly their drones.
It was a disappointment, Garcia said, but an opportunity to learn that they need to improve how they protect their gear in the field, and, perhaps, carry a second controller.
“Transporting is kind of our next step right now,” said Garcia, a cavalry scout. “How to find a way how to actually be able to get all this gear onto the individual infantryman, or scout or whoever’s on the ground utilizing this equipment and for them to actually carry it out and employ it correctly.”
Ryan said the Army would leave the competition with dozens of data points on where it needs to focus its efforts to improve small drone warfare. He said next year’s Best Drone Warrior Competition would reflect those lessons learned and find new ways to challenge soldiers to improve in the drone space.
“This is the first one of many,” the colonel said. “It’s finding the lessons, improving on things and sharing those best practices and … then continuing to make [the competition] better and more relevant and more challenging as we move forward in the future for that sole purpose of making the Army better.”
A Neros Archer FPV drone controlled by an Army Best Drone Warrior competition soldier flies through an obstacle course on the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s drone test range on Feb. 19, 2026, during the service’s first competition to find its best drone flying troops. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A C100 surveillance drone is controlled by 25th Infantry Division soldiers competing in the hunter-killer portion of the Army’s Best Drone Warrior Competition in Huntsville, Ala., on Feb. 19, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Army Sgt. 1st Class Thomas McGuire, a Green Beret with 5th Special Forces Group, races his drone in the service’s inaugural Best Drone Warrior Competition in Huntsville, Ala., on Feb. 19, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A Neros Archer FPV drone controlled by an Army Best Drone Warrior competition soldier flies through an obstacle course on the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s drone test range on Feb. 19, 2026, during the service’s first competition to find its best drone flying troops. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
