Army leaders to Congress: Drones crucial on future battlefields

Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll on Wednesday defended the service’s plans to downsize some legacy weapon systems, including cuts to the fleet of older model AH-64D Apache helicopters.

He told lawmakers at a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing that manned aircraft will have a role to play in the Army for decades to come.

“But in the world of very cheap, swarmable drones, it cannot be the only thing we invest in,” Mr. Driscoll said. “We need to overinvest in [unmanned aerial systems] and underinvest in manned systems going forward.”

Army brigades in Europe typically deploy with Apache helicopters, but one unit recently left them behind as part of a test without causing any problems in the field, Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, testified.

“It was 300% more effective. It had drones, it had loitering munitions [and] long-range fires,” Gen. George said. “We have all these systems that can come on right now.”

Drone technology is rapidly evolving, and the Army must quickly adapt to the changes. That means they must be deployed and controlled at the unit level, Gen. George said.

“We can’t afford to have a company set aside with 150 people to run drones from an airfield when we can have two or three run a drone right out of the back of a truck or one of our utility vehicles,” he said. “We can actually increase our lethality when we infuse our formations with this. That’s what we’re seeing with our experimentations.”