Marines push drones and defenses to squad level to prep ground forces for tech-heavy battlefield

The Marine Corps aims to bolster small units with advanced drone-defeating capabilities and more offensive weaponry, including one-way attack drones, as it integrates new technology into its ground fighting forces over the coming years, a top general said this week.

The Marines believe moving advanced technology into their smallest units will allow those forces to operate farther apart, making them harder to find on an increasingly transparent battlefield dominated by drones, electronic warfare, artificial intelligence and satellite imagery, said Lt. Gen. Jay Bargeron, the deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations. Bargeron laid out the Marines’ plans to ensure the Corps’ maritime terrain combat supremacy in this year’s Ground Combat Element 2040 blueprint.

The 40-page planning document published Wednesday is meant to provide a framework for shaping the Marines’ ground combat forces for the coming 15 years but is not “a rigid concept,” Bargeron said.

“It’s really an active framework for rapid modernization, for learning, for changing, for refining,” Bargeron told reporters in a news briefing. “We’ve always said that force design writ large … is not a destination. It’s a journey, it’s a campaign of learning to make sure that we stay on the fighting edge and take advantage of technology.”

The plan calls for a phased modernization approach — speeding the fielding of drone defenses and right-sizing combat formation by 2030, adopting AI and autonomous capabilities by 2035 and fully integrating AI into command and control while enabling the widespread use of machine-human teaming by 2040.

Despite the push toward artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics, Bargeron said the Marine Corps plans to keep humans in the decision-making process, even if adversaries do not.

In doing so, the new framework places “human-centered warfare” at the top of its modernization pillar, emphasizing that Marines “are the center of gravity” in efforts to ensure the Corps is “capable of dominating peer-level ground combat.” That means ensuring Marines retain “mental and physical toughness” even as technology advances, Bargeron said.

The Corps is already working to outfit its squads with the newest drone-beating capabilities. Marines have fielded the first 80 sets of what the Corps calls “dismounted organic counter-small unmanned aerial systems.” That man-portable system detects incoming small drones and gives Marines the ability to jam them through two electronic warfare elements or to shoot them down.

Pentagon officials have for several years identified small drones, including one-way attack drones, as one of the top threats troops face on the modern battlefield, largely because defending against them has proven difficult.

“One-way attack [drones] is really one of the biggest holes in our swing,” Bargeron said. “And so, we’re working hard on that.”

The Marines recently bought 400,000 rounds of a specialized anti-drone round chambered in 5.56 that can be shot by the Corps’ standard M4 and M27 rifles, Bargeron said. The rounds break into five separate projectiles after they have been fired and are effective at up to 100 meters against small, fast-moving drones, according to their manufacturer, Drone Round.

The Marine Corps is also designing a three-day course at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, Calif., to teach the basics of small drone defenses at the squad level, Bargeron said.

Meanwhile, the Corps is adding attack capabilities to its squads with first-person-view attack drones, such as the Neros Archer, and preparing to field larger loitering munitions to combat squads, in a new program it dubbed “Organic Precision Fires-Light and Medium.”

The Corps is training its antiarmor missile gunners to man the loitering munitions, which are one-way attack drones that can hover in the air to look for a target and strike from more than 12 miles away from the operator.

Bargeron said antiarmor missile gunners will become known as precision-strike Marines. They are expected to field the light loitering munitions in the coming months. The antiarmor medium loitering munitions will come later.

Giving Marine rifle squads the ability to operate the loitering drones and strike targets themselves from the front lines will provide a marked change in their fighting abilities, the general said.

“That’s something that Marines in a rifle squad, platoon, company would have had to depend on artillery somewhere else, mortars somewhere else, aircraft somewhere else … to talk (strikes) on to the target,” he said. “So, in the hands of the individual Marines to be able to strike targets like that — I think that will be dramatic.”