Soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division operates an Infantry Squad Vehicle during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., on June 12, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
FORT IRWIN, Calif. — High atop a ridgeline, Army Sgt. Carlos Santos launched his small reconnaissance drone 600 feet into the evening sky for a peek over the mountainous terrain separating him from the enemy force he knew was coming.
The 4-pound quadcopter — a Teal Black Widow — buzzed quietly into the distance and disappeared. Santos and his cavalry squad remained hidden in their Infantry Squad Vehicle among boulders and brush as he scanned the Army National Training Center’s desert terrain for threats.
“Enemy force about 5 to 6 klicks from here,” the cavalry scout with the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team noted, using military slang for kilometers. “Fifteen to 17 vehicles. Tanks.”
Santos reported the enemy — Fort Irwin’s dedicated opposing force, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, known as Blackhorse — and called for fire. In moments, using a small drone, a communications link to higher headquarters and simulated strikes from artillery and kamikaze drones, the first threat in a weeklong battle was eliminated.
Santos and the rest of the approximately 4,000 soldiers of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team have spent recent weeks at NTC, the Army’s 750,000-acre expanse of desolate training grounds in Southern California’s Mojave Desert, working to integrate the Army’s latest technology into their formation built around the service’s heaviest weapons, including M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
Small drones are a game changer for cavalry scouts, who were previously limited to finding only threats they could see with their eyes.
Now, Santos can send a drone up to 1,000 feet in the air and 5 miles in any direction to peer around obstacles while maintaining cover.
“We couldn’t have just walked those [5 miles] in like 10 minutes and spotted all those targets, right?” Santos said. “So, for us scouts, this is something that gives us a new kind of access and speed. You can get these drones up in the air and clear all these open areas super-fast. Get it up, spot the targets, call for fire on them, and move on.”
Recent rapid battlefield tech advancements — underscored by evolving drone tactics in the Russia-Ukraine war — have forced American military leaders to reconsider how they would fight a similarly equipped adversary, such as China or Russia. The widespread adoption of reconnaissance and strike drones, satellite surveillance and electromagnetic warfare capabilities mean large formations such as an armored brigade cannot easily hide or mass their forces to fight.
For the 3rd ID’s 2nd Brigade, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., the NTC rotation allowed them to test new technology and tactics in an austere, warlike environment against a peer enemy for the first time.
Army Staff Sgt. James Miller-Kerr controls a medium range reconnaissance drone from inside an M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle during force-on-force operations June 11, 2026, at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. Miller-Kerr is a drone operator assigned to 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, which spent much of June testing new capabilities at Fort Irwin. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Soldiers with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division evacuate a simulated casualty after a firefight with opposing force soldiers from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Army Capt. Casey White walks through Fort Irwin’s desert alongside a Bradley Fighting Vehicle on June 11, 2026 while training at the California installation’s National Training Center. White is a troops commander in 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A 3rd Infantry Division soldier mans his M4 rifle in a firefight with opposing force soldiers from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Soldiers with the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division discuss battle plans during a during a National Training Center rotation at Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert on June 10, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A soldier with the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division mans a security position June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Top Army leaders in late 2024 charged the 3rd Infantry Division’s two heavy brigades with experimenting with the service’s latest technologies — mostly off-the-shelf capabilities the Army could buy, test and field quickly — to find ways to become more lethal and survivable on a future battlefield. The program, known as Transformation in Contact, or TiC, came in direct response to innovations on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has said he worries the U.S. military has fallen behind its Chinese counterpart, which has quickly adopted new technology and developed a drone-fighting doctrine. Transformation in Contact efforts, he told Congress last month, give the service its best chance to survive modern large-scale combat against China or Russia.
“No one can predict the next war, but we cannot wait … to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield,” Driscoll said. “We must act now to enable our soldiers.”
The Army has given TiC formations a wide berth to try a huge inventory of new gear and accept risk in training, said Col. Alex Perez-Cruz, the commander of the 2nd Brigade, nicknamed the Spartans.
“You’re going to try something that may not work, but the reward is you innovate and if you did something new that worked, now you have a new method,” Perez-Cruz said. “We have to have a learning organization that is willing to fail and willing to try new things and willing to do it quickly.”
Army brigades in recent decades have trained at NTC to hone their skills ahead of deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan or Eastern Europe. This month, the Army gave Perez-Cruz’s brigade more leeway to experiment with new tech and tactics.
Perez-Cruz spread his battalions across much more ground than a heavy Army brigade would have during the Global War on Terrorism, at times leaving miles between vehicles. He sent dismounted cavalry scouts and infantry soldiers forward quickly on the Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV), an unarmored troop transport based on Chevrolet’s Colorado midsize truck that can carry nine soldiers and their gear.
It marked the first time the Army had paired the ISV with a heavy unit whose scouts and infantrymen usually work from Bradleys or up-armored vehicles such as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.
The potential reward of employing a tactic never used before was worth the risk, Perez-Cruz said.
Under the cover of night, the colonel sent his ISV crews 13 to 19 miles toward where he expected the Blackhorse soldiers to be operating and tasked them with immediately employing drones and electromagnetic warfare sensors to find the enemy.
“I didn’t think that we would be able to put all the technologies into use so quickly,” said Perez-Cruz, who next month will relinquish command of the Spartan Brigade after two years at its helm. “And in that first day, within an hour I already had … ISVs forward, we were setting up launch sites for the one-way attack [drones], we were using the medium-range [reconnaissance drones] and simultaneously they were all talking to me on new forms of communication. They did that all within an hour.”
An M1 Abrams tank from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division operates during a National Training Center rotation at Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert on June 11, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
An M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle from the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division operates at rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., on June 12, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division operates an M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., on June 11, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division operates an M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., on June 11, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Army Command Sgt. Maj. Joe Daugherty, left, speaks with a soldier during a training rotation June 12, 2026, at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. Daugherty is the senior enlisted leader for the 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, which spent much of June testing new capabilities at Fort Irwin. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
An M1 Abrams tank from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division operates during a National Training Center rotation at Fort Irwin, Calif., in the Mojave Desert on June 11, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Army Spc. Lathan Thomley looks over the controls of a Switchblade 600 one-way-attack drone during training for the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division on June 11, 2026. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Perez-Cruz tasked the brigade’s reconnaissance-focused 6th Squadron, 8th Cavalry Regiment with leading the brigade’s transformation efforts. Lt. Col. J.P. Steadman, 6-8’s commander, challenged his soldiers to take risks as they adopted new technology.
The unit added platoons focused fully on drone and electromagnetic warfare. Drone and EW specialists were embedded with the squadron’s three front-line scout troops, and a platoon of tanks was assigned to each commander.
Those troop commanders, Steadman said, have more firepower and capability available to them than a brigade commander would have had about a dozen years ago.
“We are about three times more lethal than we were before [Transformation in Contact] based on everything we’ve been given and done,” Steadman said. “It makes the troop look like a … combined arms battalion, which I think throws the enemy off on what they are expecting to see.”
Not everything worked smoothly.
Soldiers struggled to keep their electronics charged in the harsh desert environment. Soldiers brought high-capacity portable power stations and some solar chargers into the field, but at times they lacked the juice to fly their power-hungry drones or use their EW systems, Steadman said.
“We thought we had plenty of kilowatts for the things we needed to charge,” he said. “And then we get out here and we find that there are so many other little nuances that we weren’t prepared for, and we’re struggling.”
Steadman believes the conditions at Fort Irwin, as temperatures rocketed above 100 degrees, caused the battery issues. He said the unit would analyze the power issues when it returned to Fort Stewart.
Drone operators at times had trouble controlling their small systems in the Fort Irwin wind, which regularly exceeds 30 mph after sundown.
“The terrain out here — the environment is not good for drones, especially at night,” said Pfc. Conner Schadwil, a cavalry scout and drone operator. “The mountains and the wind are bad for UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) — the mountains block the signal, so if the drone needs to go anywhere, it needs to fly high, but the higher you go the stronger the wind so it just gets knocked around.”
In some cases, soldiers were getting too focused on the newest technology and needed a reminder that the basics of combined arms maneuver still matter, Steadman said.
“For the first six to eight hours, we were using our equipment really well and we had a lot of standoff and we had a lot of success. And when you look at the kill count between what we lost versus what [Blackhorse] lost, it was extremely favorable,” Steadman said. “After about the first six to eight hours, that’s when some of our battery power problems were coming and that’s when we weren’t getting as much sensing. And then [Blackhorse] was able to maneuver up onto us and kill us because we were just sitting back and waiting.”
He reminded them to aggressively hunt the enemy.
“When we started doing that and we started getting into the terrain and we started using the terrain to our advantage, we were then surprising the enemy and getting our kill count back up,” Steadman said.
The new tech primarily means that first contact with the enemy is with a machine, Perez-Cruz said. Everything else is the same “basic blocking and tackling” armored brigades have been doing for years.
“If you find it first with one of the drones that has a [lethal] payload on it, great. If you find it first with a scout who calls it in, and we hit a rocket, we hit artillery with it, we hit it with mortars, great,” Perez-Cruz said. “We’re not doing anything magic. Machines aren’t magic. If anything is magic, it’s our soldiers ... who are out here and training and very lethal.”
Soldiers with the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division talk early in the morning June 12, 2026 over Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A soldier with the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division takes a security position June 11, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team fight with opposing force soldiers from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team fights with opposing force soldiers from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Soldiers with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division place a tourniquet on a simulated casualty after a firefight with opposing force soldiers from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
Soldiers with the Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division engage in a firefight with opposing force soldiers from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
A 3rd Infantry Division soldier fires his M4 rifle in a firefight with opposing force soldiers from the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment on June 12, 2026, during a training rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
