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Why the Army Needs Units Driving Drone Development and How to Do It

 

Col. Neil A. Hollenbeck, U.S. Army

 

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We need to be more flexible in our approach … change how we operate, change how we equip, and then change how we buy things.

—Gen. Randy George, Senate testimony, 2024

 

The 2025 Hudson Institute report by Dan Patt and William Greenwalt, titled Required to Fail, is a tour de force on the joint requirements process.¹ The authors make a compelling argument for a breakout from process tyranny, and few will weep for the recently disestablished Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System.² Nevertheless, their tone risks alienating the very people in the Department of Defense (DOD) who know how to make their ideas work. For small-drone capabilities, the focus should be moving the locus of decision-making closer to the operational force. This will not bypass the Army’s acquisition community. On the contrary, they will be integral, and the process cannot succeed without them. The Army should start with a pilot effort in which an acquisition manager, empowered by a broadly written requirement, enables a specific unit to rapidly iterate with industry partners on engineering redesigns of small drones.

The Army is making steady progress on capabilities for small-drone warfare, having implemented a number of initiatives in just the last two or three years.³ The “Transformation in Contact” initiative is putting drones of all types directly into brigade combat teams.⁴ The Army’s Human-Machine Integrated Formations initiative is finding new ways to organize and operate with drones and other AI-enabled robotics.⁵ The Army is pursuing short-, medium-, and long-range reconnaissance drones, “soldier-borne” drones, tethered drones, first-person-view (FPV) drones, and loitering munitions.⁶ Many are already fielded for trials with selected units.⁷

Nevertheless, Ukraine and Russia are currently leading the integration of small drones into ground combat operations.⁸ The United States is lagging behind, and the gap is growing. Ukraine’s military has achieved astounding agility through an innovation process driven by their operational units.⁹ Meanwhile, Russia adeptly copies those innovations and scales them better than Ukraine.¹⁰

With the advantage of American industry and the U.S. Army’s own modernization enterprise, the Army should lead the world in developing capabilities for small-drone warfare. It does not because the Army’s process, while designed to take input from operational units, still holds them at too far a distance. If the Army wants maximum speed and agility, units must do more than inform the process—they must drive it. First, it is important to understand why speed and agility are easier said than done.

The Problem with Agility: Willow Run

During World War II, the Ford Motor Company manufactured B-24 Liberator bombers at a massive, purpose-built facility at Willow Run, Michigan. Nonetheless, Ford could not keep production going at first. “Back from the fighting fronts would come complaints or suggestions regarding certain features, and the plane designers came through with alterations in design with no consideration for the production program,” wrote one Ford senior executive.¹¹ At Ford’s Willow Run plant, they spent so much time reconfiguring and retooling that they were barely producing any airplanes.¹²

To solve the problem, the Army shielded Willow Run from change directives and set up after-production facilities where workers applied changes to finished aircraft, sometimes undoing work just done. Though inefficient, it allowed them to be agile in response to warfighter needs without sacrificing the production schedule. One of those facilities made the modifications that allowed James Doolittle’s B-25 squadron to take off from an aircraft carrier and bomb Tokyo in 1942.¹³

It is easier to be agile with small drones. Today, some Ukrainian brigades can get updated drones within a month of requesting changes.¹⁴ Simple software updates can be even faster. This turnaround is possible for those brigades because they have close working relationships with specific companies that built their business models around being responsive to their needs. One U.S. Army brigade commander involved with security assistance to Ukraine explained:

Imagine that you’re the commander of a Ukrainian brigade. Well, there is a UAS [uncrewed aerial system] commercial company that started at the same time as your brigade began combat operations. Your team and the UAS company grow up together. They build drones and modify them to defeat threats in your local area. Your brigade deals almost exclusively with them because the modifications are constant.¹⁵

This approach is an anathema to U.S. defense acquisition and for good reason. First, operational commanders lack the expertise and statutory authority to develop and procure their own equipment. Congress entrusts that responsibility to a corps of acquisition professionals under the supervision of a Senate-confirmed service acquisition executive.¹⁶ Second, it is terribly inefficient. One Army unit could buy a system from a company, unaware that another Army unit is getting a better system from a different company for a lower price. Meanwhile, multiple units could be buying the same system from one company on separate contracts, mutually unaware. This is to say nothing of compliance with testing, cybersecurity, and other rules. Finally, as in Ukraine, it results in uneven fielding, a euphemism for a hodgepodge of incompatible systems, supported by a patchwork of arrangements for parts and repair.

Another concern about units buying their own equipment is that it consumes funds intended for training and maintenance.¹⁷ The Ukrainian government addressed this problem by allocating funds specifically for units to procure their own drones.¹⁸ But that strategy would find no champions inside the U.S. Army’s modernization enterprise, where the prevailing view is that, in a no-growth fiscal environment, it would just siphon funds from other important programs, only to be frittered away for the reasons above.

The Unwieldy Triad of Requirements, Acquisition, and Funding

Army units can work directly with companies and avoid these problems if requirements and acquisition experts run the process. Two things make that hard. The first is the organizational distance between the key people involved. The second is that most programs do not need that degree of agility. For understanding how this works in practice, it helps to see the process from the outside looking in.

Imagine a small business with novel drone technology they want to sell to the Army, for which no validated requirement yet exists. Specifically, who in the Army is their customer? The customer is the one who buys something to do a job or solve a problem.¹⁹ In most cases, companies selling to the Army should recognize that operational units are not the customer—they are the user. The customer is a group of other people acting on behalf of the units.

The contract the company seeks will be awarded by a contracting official on behalf of an acquisition manager, who works to satisfy a requirement defined by a capability developer. All belong to different Army organizations. In most cases, the funding will have been allocated a few years earlier, through a process managed by the Army headquarters. The last part is important: it can take two years or longer to develop and staff a new requirement for approval.²⁰ Then, because DOD budgets pass through many gates, it might be two more years before funds flow.²¹

Some of the above can happen in parallel, and no two efforts flow through the process in exactly the same way. There are also ways for Army senior leaders to fast-track efforts. The bottom line for a company is that, as a rule of thumb, it should not expect to sell the Army something the Army does not already know it needs.

However, if a company’s technology meets a need described in an already-validated, funded requirement, then the customer is an acquisition manager. Acquisition managers want technologies that help them meet requirements on schedule and under budget. You could win a bid if your solution does that better than the competition. However, the acquisition manager is constrained: they must operate within the bounds of the language in the requirement document. The solution cannot be too different from what the requirement writer, who functions as the user representative, envisioned. In most cases, all the above—the requirement writer, the user, and the acquisition project manager—work on different installations and have separate chains of command (see figure 1).

Under the Army’s current construct, requirements for small drones are written in a directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia, which is led by a colonel who reports to a three-star general at Fort Eustis, Virginia. That general, in turn, reports to a four-star general in Austin, Texas, who reports to the secretary of the Army at the Pentagon. The users are in brigades with chains of command passing through two- and three-star division and corps commanders at bases like Fort Hood, Texas, before reaching a four-star general at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who reports to the secretary of the Army. Meanwhile, the acquisition project manager is a colonel based in Huntsville, Alabama, supervised by a one-star general who reports to the Pentagon’s Army acquisition executive (a senior political appointee), who also reports to the secretary of the Army.

Since the requirements writer often works on capabilities that will be fielded years in the future, some might argue they represent future users. Nevertheless, they have been in the users’ shoes, have their best interests at heart, and have good intuition for what they will need. The same is true for an acquisition project manager. They also get input directly from units early in the requirement drafting process and as the Army develops and tests prototypes. This communication happens through formal and informal mechanisms, including warfighter forums, prototype feedback events, and dialogue via personal and professional networks.

Nevertheless, the Army needs shorter decision cycles for the most rapidly evolving technologies. Gen. James Rainey, commanding general of Army Futures Command, described the challenge: “In some cases, when we document the requirement for a capability, the only thing we know with certainty is that what we need in two years will be different. The result is that we must fund requirements before we fully understand them. Later, when we fully understand the requirement, it is too late to change what we funded.”²² The problem is compounded by the organizational distance between units—the users—and decision-makers in the Army’s separate requirements, funding, and acquisition chains.

The Customer and the CONEX Metric

A CONEX is a metal shipping container that units keep on hand for if they deploy on short notice.²³ It is also where units store things they were issued but never use.²⁴ Units cannot refuse what the Army buys them, but they can leave it in a CONEX. So, the Army Applications Lab created a “CONEX metric,” where they score prototypes based on how often soldiers think they would take them out of the CONEX.²⁵

User adoption can be a problem in any large organization where the users and the people buying things on their behalf are separated by space and time. The reverse can also be true: sometimes users want something their organization will not buy. This challenge is not unique to the military.

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, is known for his writing on disruptive innovation.²⁶ But he is also known for the idea of orienting product innovation on customer “Jobs to Be Done.”²⁷ The idea is that product developers should focus less on the attributes of potential customers, which is the traditional approach to market segmentation, and more on the problems customers are trying to solve when they set out to make a purchase. In doing so, companies develop more useful products. However, this works less well when the customers are not the end users.

For example, some Brigham Young University students had an idea for a start-up in 2012.²⁸ Their product was a wireless blood oxygen level monitor for infants. Initially, they thought it could be used in hospitals, and they got positive feedback from nurses who valued the convenience.²⁹ But the product did not address a problem hospital administrators were trying to solve. “So, we learned a very valuable lesson: your user is not always your customer. Even though we found a user that loved the idea and wanted to use it, they did not have purchasing power.”³⁰ Instead, they marketed their product, the Owlet Smart Sock, directly to parents who worried about their infants during the night. Five years later, they had sold over 150,000 at a premium price.³¹ My wife and I were among their customers.

Microsoft had the opposite problem developing augmented reality goggles for the Army. The Army began developing the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) in 2018.³² Championed by then–Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. James McConville, the Army envisioned IVAS as a transformational capability.³³ It would allow soldiers to do everything from see in the dark to receive video feeds from vehicles and drones.³⁴ But early versions of the system were cumbersome and had serious shortcomings, including software glitches.³⁵ Some soldiers said they simply would not use them.³⁶

The Army gave operational units’ feedback to Microsoft, but the production schedule moved faster than they could make fixes. By 2023, the Army was scheduled to receive five thousand systems, which they had good reason to believe units would receive unhappily and then leave in a CONEX. Instead, the Army fielded the systems to nondeployable training units that provided additional feedback to improve later versions.³⁷ In 2025, Microsoft partnered with Anduril, which will take over the development of IVAS while continuing to use Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.³⁸ It remains to be seen how IVAS will fare going forward.

The moral of the story is not that the user is always right. The Owlet Smart Sock was probably not a good replacement for standard hospital pulse oximeters, which are clumsy but cheap and reliable. Likewise, not all soldiers giving feedback on IVAS accounted for how it would digitally connect them to an ecosystem of other systems still in the modernization pipeline. To them, the IVAS was just an overly complicated pair of night vision goggles.³⁹ But it helps to have the user as close to the decision-making as possible, especially if tactics and technology are changing fast.

First-Person-View Drones as an Illustration

Ukraine started using FPV drones in earnest in early 2023.⁴⁰ Even two years later, U.S. Army units that wanted to train with FPV drones could not easily obtain them.⁴¹ The good news was that the Army was staffing a well-written requirement document for FPV drones that was on the fast track for approval. However, only a small number will go to the operational force sometime soon.

If the Army had viewed FPV drones as especially important, it could have approved a directed requirement, which would allow a quick purchase of off-the-shelf systems for an urgent need.⁴² But directed requirements are unfunded mandates. The money must come from somewhere in the budget, and U.S. military services cannot easily move funds from one priority to another on less than two years’ notice.⁴³ Once a budget is passed, the Army can make only minor adjustments without permission from a congressional committee. For modernization funding, reprogramming that exceeds $15 million or 20 percent of a line item, or any transfer between appropriation accounts, requires prior approval.⁴⁴ Even the small changes the Army can make on its own authority typically involve months of staffing for approval. Since units would also need FPV drone training, places and permissions to fly them, and other support not readily available, it is understandable that the Army would not tackle the above to rush a rapid equipping.

The Army’s draft FPV drone requirement is well-informed and designed to evolve. It was developed by the Maneuver Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate, which works closely with the operational force.⁴⁵ It calls for continuous upgrades as component technologies mature and requirement updates at least every three years.⁴⁶ By the standards of U.S. defense acquisition, this is agile, but it does not compare to innovation in wartime Ukraine. For comparison, in the first two years of the war, drone warfare went through four evolutions of tactics and technology.⁴⁷ Today, the innovation cycle for drones in Ukraine is closer to three months.⁴⁸ If the Army wants that kind of agility for at least some part of its small-drone warfare capability development, it will need something more than frequent requirement updates.

Flexible Requirements, Flexible Funding

The solution proposed by Rainey is to write requirements and fund programs in a way that gives the Army more flexibility. Instead of describing a specific kind of system, describe a general capability, and then deliberately flag for joint staff, DOD, and congressional overseers what the Army is doing with those broadly written documents and why. By fielding systems in small tranches, the Army can update a design or even pivot to a different kind of system—so long as it serves the same purpose—without rerunning the entire approval process.⁴⁹

Operating within the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), requirement writers had to choose which JCIDS document(s) and process lane(s) to use.⁵⁰ This was a strategy unto itself. It may still be since the disestablishment of JCIDS left the military services’ internal requirements systems in place. But even JCIDS directed capability developers to focus on performance parameters and system attributes without over specifying or including technical specifications.⁵¹ Thus, it should be possible for an experienced capability developer to write a requirement broadly enough to accommodate multiple solution approaches while remaining fully within the intent of the system.⁵² Still, Rainey cautions, “Agility is not right for everything.”⁵³

When the Army needs to develop and manufacture a large system that does not exist on the commercial market, like a tank, the requirement can’t be vague or frequently changing. These systems require years of development and large capital investments from industry. Success requires stable requirements and predictable funding. The agile, capability-focused approach is right for smaller tranches of lower-cost systems that have a rapid technology refresh rate and no major DOTMLPF-P implications.⁵⁴

For systems like small drones, fielding in smaller tranches is fundamental to the approach. Interestingly, this is how the U.S. Navy purchased manned aircraft between the two world wars, when technology was rapidly changing. In his book, The Origins of Victory, Andrew Krepinevich described this buying strategy.⁵⁵ The Navy knew the aircraft they purchased would become obsolete before they could field them across the entire Navy. So, instead, they made more frequent, smaller buys, which must have complicated training and maintenance—a very important drawback. But the smaller numbers of aircraft they fielded were always state-of-the-art, and it lowered the stakes for individual purchase decisions.⁵⁶

If the Army wants to write broader (or more flexible) requirements and funding justifications, it can do that now. They are specific partly because the staff who wrote them were trying to keep later actions in line with earlier intent. Capability developers cannot complain if the acquisition system does not provide what they thought they requested—they should have written it in the requirement document. Congressional staff scrutinize vaguely worded funding justifications because they support congressional members who want funds spent in line with the original intent. Acquisition managers, who help draft the funding justifications, know better than to word them too broadly. First, congressional staff will ask for more specificity. Second, narrower funding justifications protect a program’s funding from pop-up priorities. The more specific the funding justification is, the harder it is for someone in another part of the Army to decide that the funds should be reprogrammed for use on something else.

The Army learned these lessons the hard way. James Burton was a colonel at the Pentagon in the 1980s, and in his book, The Pentagon Wars, he explained how shifting requirements hampered development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle: “Each time a committee met, the mission changed and new design features were added.”⁵⁷ A program that might have taken around seven years muddled through for twenty before it was fielding vehicles. To be fair, it eventually produced a world-class fighting vehicle, which is saving Ukrainian soldiers’ lives today.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, with those kinds of experiences in institutional memory, acquisition managers are not quick to ask the Army to revisit a requirement. They worry about what else will change in the process.⁵⁹

In this system, everyone is the Ford executive at Willow Run, trying to get something done through a process that takes time. The system rewards consistency. The inherited institutional wisdom is to be specific early and stick to the plan. This is a hard habit for a large organization with a strong culture to unlearn.

Put an Operational Unit at the Center of the Process

Instead of having that requirement developed in the field and then sent back to the enterprise … all the enterprise comes to us in the field, and so now it is much more user-driven, and much more collaborative amongst all the entities within the Army enterprise.

—Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, December 2024⁶⁰

 

Gen. Randy George, the chief of staff of the Army, wants agility.⁶¹ By the standards of any army in the world, the resources at his disposal are vast. But they are locked up in decades of the Army’s own accumulated requirements and Army-generated, congressionally approved funding justifications. For most modernization programs, the good news is that this is exactly as it should be. Using production at Willow Run as an analogy for Army transformation, it would be a mistake to let the aircrews directly onto the factory floor and bring production grinding to a halt. But the Army can shield the main production lines of Army transformation and still be agile for capabilities like small drones.

The way to do that is to make the operational force the customer. Operational commanders need not literally make purchase decisions. But they should be more in the acquisition manager’s ear. If they ask for minor changes on a low-cost drone, they should see them in a matter of months, in their own units. And they should rarely have to take receipt of a system they did not want. What makes this different from traditional capability development is that the Army modernization enterprise would be developing solutions with units instead of developing solutions for units (see figure 2).

The Army can learn how to implement this with a pilot effort for small drones. It must be run by an acquisition manager but should be oriented on a specific operational unit. To minimize the burden on busy battalions and brigades, the acquisition office should interface with the unit at the division level, where there is a robust staff. Alternatively, an opposing forces unit like the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment would work well since they do monthly force-on-force exercises and have unique cachet as a source of lessons learned for the operational force.

The Army should start with a capability-based requirement—one that describes what the unit needs to do, and under what conditions, with minimal description of the solution. This would be similar to what the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, testifying to Congress in 2022, called a “capability of record.”⁶² It is also similar to the Army’s recent “characteristics of need statement” for Next Generation Command and Control.⁶³ Through a Commercial Solutions Opening, invite companies to propose solutions to the problem.⁶⁴ Next, let the unit work through an acquisition project manager to choose an initial tranche of off-the-shelf systems from a company that wants to rapidly evolve the solution with unit feedback, as Ukrainian companies do for the units they support.

The budget and structure of the contract vehicle would both serve to keep the scope and scale of the changes manageable. The Army can use a Federal Acquisition Regulation-based contract or use the statutory “Other Transaction Authority” or a combination of both.⁶⁵ The critical factor is empowering a contracting officer who understands the contract’s objectives and possesses the experience to structure it effectively.⁶⁶ For example, the Army could use an Other Transaction Authority agreement for off-the-shelf drones that already comply with law and DOD policy but are intended to serve as a baseline prototype—a foundation for further development. Working closely with the unit, companies would then deliver improvements or alternative solutions at regular intervals based on unit requests. Eventually, as systems mature and designs stabilize, the effort could spin-off a Federal Acquisition Regulation-based Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract, facilitating flexible ordering over a defined period, with continuing improvements.⁶⁷

Soldiers and companies need to have real-time, back-and-forth conversations about problems and solutions. However, formal change requests should go through the acquisition project manager, who will guide the unit in making wise, budget-informed decisions regarding change requests and their timing. For example, while many software updates can happen quickly, hardware changes take longer, and an entirely new solution approach may or may not require a new contracting action.⁶⁸

It also takes special expertise to meet requirements for safety testing and cybersecurity.⁶⁹ Units do not know how to get a munition approved by the Army Fuze Safety Review Board, an airworthiness release, or authority to operate a new device on an Army computer network; however, acquisition project managers do. They can anticipate needs, solve problems, and set realistic expectations. For example, by getting the right experts from the testing enterprise involved early, a properly resourced project manager with chain-of-command support can align safety waivers and interim authorities to test so that, with an operational commander assuming and mitigating risk, a unit can use systems that are on the path to full approval^.70 They might also arrange for some testing to happen in theater, as has been done for certain counterdrone systems.⁷¹ The Army would learn by doing, solving problems as it goes and proving out process innovations it can apply elsewhere. If, in the doing, the Army comes up against hard barriers in law and policy, it will be well-positioned to advocate for changes.

Another challenge has been that the Army acquisition enterprise has not historically been organized around battlefield capabilities but around commodities.⁷² Consider the capability to move an infantry squad by air. The helicopter is developed by one acquisition office, its radios and machine guns come from two others, and the refueling system comes from yet another. There is a version of this for small drones—one drone might carry a munition, a sensor, and a radio while relying on fuel or ground charging from separate acquisition efforts. For ease of integration, the Army might benefit from allowing closely related commodities to be managed within a single program, even if it means accepting some duplication across acquisition portfolios.⁷³

A likely counterargument is that the Army already uses a unit-centric approach through the Transformation in Contact initiative. The Army’s acquisition manager for uncrewed aerial systems takes unit input seriously and applies it as quickly as circumstances allow, using existing authorities creatively and working across organizational boundaries to move much faster than in years past. But this is still units enabling the acquisition manager, rather than vice versa. While units are giving feedback on potential solutions, they have little say in which systems they receive or how the Army acts on their feedback.

Does the Army Need to Go This Fast?

Some question whether U.S. Army modernization needs to move at Ukraine war speed, and whether that is sustainable. One argument against faster fielding is that there is no point in giving systems to units faster than the Army can give them the doctrine to use them, the resources to train with them, and the means to sustain them. However, for unit-driven innovation, that logic is exactly backward.

When the Army pushes technology into units, it owes them a total package. When units lead the Army, pulling technology in, the institution will necessarily trail behind. Unit commanders understand this. They know that when they are doing something that has never been done before, it does not come with a field manual, a training package, and a stable supply chain. Those are things the Army will develop as fast as it can based on what units are learning.

Another caution against undue haste is that the Army has finite resources, which means not reacting to everything we see in Ukraine. If one solution turns out to be a dead end on the evolutionary tree for military technology, the Army does not need to have used all its resources and credibility pursuing it. Neither should every unit in the Army be “buying and trying” the Army’s budget away. The Army must keep the effort manageably and affordably small. But a handful of units pursuing a balanced portfolio of promising capabilities is a sound organizational strategy for a globally engaged force in an era of rapid technological change.⁷⁴

Conclusion

Instead of the modernization enterprise developing small-drone warfare capabilities with input from the operational Army, it should enable the operational Army to develop its own. The enterprise can do this without losing its ability to manage resources, integrate efforts, and enforce compliance with laws and policies. But all the components of the program—from the requirement strategy and contracting approach to the organization of the acquisition management team—must be designed to support a unit-driven effort.

It may be unfair to expect the Army to develop capability at the speed of a country at war, like Ukraine. The Army will have more resources and a different risk calculus during wartime. However, the Army’s peacetime modernization enterprise is also its wartime modernization enterprise. If war happens suddenly, the Army will not suddenly have different people, different processes, and a different industrial base. The Army should give itself a running start. Start small but start now—trying new ways to put the operational force in the driver’s seat for capability development and building the innovation culture the Army will need to adapt and win in any future.

 

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Notes

• Epigraph. To Receive Testimony on the Posture of the Department of the Army in Review of the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2025 and the Future Years Defense Program Before the Committee on Armed Services, 118th Cong., 2nd sess. (18 April 2024) (statement of Randy George, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army), 28, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/041824fullcommitteetranscript.pdf.

1. Dan Patt and William Greenwalt, Required to Fail: Beyond Documents—Accelerating Joint Advantage Through Direct Resourcing (Hudson Institute, 10 February 2025), https://www.hudson.org/technology/required-fail-beyond-documents-accelerating-joint-advantage-through-direct-resourcing-dan-patt-william-greenwalt.
2. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg, memorandum for senior Pentagon leadership, commanders of combatant commands, and defense agency and DOD field activity directors, “Reforming the Joint Requirements Process to Accelerate Fielding of Warfighting Capabilities,” 20 August 2025.
3. In this article, “small drones” refers to those the Department of Defense classifies as Group 1 and Group 2 uncrewed aircraft systems, which weigh less than fifty-five pounds and fly below 3,500 feet. For these categories, see Daniel M. Gettinger, Defense Primer: Categories of Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 25 October 2024), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12797/2.
4. Mark Pomerleau, “Army ‘Transforming-in-Contact’ Unit Using More Drones than Ever Before,” DefenseScoop, 13 February 2025, https://defensescoop.com/2025/02/13/army-transforming-in-contact-unit-drones-uas-exercises/.
5. James Rainey, “Continuous Transformation,” Military Review 104, no. 5 (September-October 2024): 13–15, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/SO-24/SO-24-Continuous-Transformation/.
6. Michael Brabner (lieutenant colonel/chief, Robotics Requirements Division Air Branch, Maneuver Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate), interview with author via Microsoft Teams, 6 February 2025.
7. Pomerleau, “Army ‘Transforming-in-Contact’ Unit.”
8. The author made the same point, in much the same words, in his earlier article from the Army War College’s War Room. See Neil Hollenbeck, “How to Transform the Army for Drone Warfare,” War Room, 9 January 2025, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/transform-for-drones/.
9. Oleksandra Molloy, Drones in Modern Warfare: Lessons Learnt from the War in Ukraine, Australian Army Occasional Paper No. 29 (Australian Army Research Centre, October 2022), 57–61, https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/library/occasional-papers/drones-modern-warfare.
10. Sam Bendett (Russian military analyst, Center for Naval Analyses), interview with author, 6 January 2025. Bendett does drone warfare research funded by Marine Special Operations Command.
11. Charles E. Sorensen and Samuel T. Williamson, My Forty Years at Ford (Wayne State University Press, 2006), loc. 4168, Kindle.
12. Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (Random House, 2012), 235–42.
13. Herman, Freedom’s Forge.
14. Matthew Loh, “A Ukrainian Drone Commander Says Battlefield Tech Can Change Within a Month, and the Old Style of Yearslong Military Contracts Can’t Keep Up,” Business Insider, 21 January 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-drone-commander-tech-changes-month-military-contracts-keep-up-2025-1.
15. Nicholas Dvonch (colonel/commander, 1st Cavalry Division Artillery), email to author, 19 January 2025. 1st Cavalry Division Artillery was then under operational control of Security Assistance Group-Ukraine.
16. Defense Acquisition Workforce, 10 U.S.C. §§ 1701–1766 (2023); Senior Acquisition Executive, 10 U.S.C. § 4502(a)(1) (2023).
17. Brian North (colonel/director, Army Futures Command commander’s action group), discussion with author via Microsoft Teams, 1 February 2025. North previously served on the Army Staff.
18. Kateryna Bondar, How Ukraine Rebuilt Its Military Acquisition System Around Commercial Technology (Center for Strategic and International Studies, 13 January 2025), https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraine-rebuilt-its-military-acquisition-system-around-commercial-technology. In December 2024, Ukraine allocated $650 million over eleven months for military units to procure drones.
19. Clayton M. Christensen et al., “Know Your Customers’ ‘Jobs to Be Done,’” Harvard Business Review, September 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done.
20. Ralph Standbrook, discussion with author via Microsoft Teams, 24 January 2024. Standbrook worked on the Army Staff, G-8 Force Development Directorate, when the capability development document (CDD) for mobile protected firepower, which was to field in 2025, was approved in 2018. The CDD was based on an initial capabilities document approved in 2016, which had been in staffing since 2013.
21. Brendan W. McGarry, DOD Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE): Overview and Selected Issues for Congress, CRS Report No. R47178 (CRS, 11 July 2022), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47178.
22. Rainey, “Continuous Transformation,” 12.
23. Casey Perley, “How Can We Measure If Defense Innovation Works?,” War on the Rocks, 10 February 2025, https://warontherocks.com/2025/02/how-can-we-measure-if-defense-innovation-works.
24. Perley, “How Can We Measure If Defense Innovation Works?”
25. Perley, “How Can We Measure If Defense Innovation Works?”
26. Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Harvard Business Review Press, 1997).
27. Christensen et al., “Know Your Customers’ ‘Jobs to Be Done.’”
28. Natalie Sportelli, “Owlet’s Infant Health Monitor Is Winning Over Millennial Parents—Doctors Are Another Matter,” Forbes, 3 October 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliesportelli/2017/10/03/owlets-infant-health-monitor-is-winning-over-millennial-parents-doctors-are-another-matter/.
29. Tanner Christensen, “IBMC 2013: Owlet - 1st Place,” posted 18 July 2016 by Business Model Competition Global, YouTube, 0:25–1:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-8v_RgwGe0.
30. Christensen, “IBMC 2013: Owlet - 1st Place,” 1:12–1:22.
31. Sportelli, “Owlet’s Infant Health Monitor.”
32. U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Weapons Systems Annual Assessment, GAO-24-106831 (U.S. GAO, June 2024), 113, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106831.pdf.
33. Ashley Roque, “Last Stand for IVAS? New Challenges, Delays as Army Debates Future of Augmented Reality Goggles,” Breaking Defense, 10 May 2023, https://breakingdefense.com/2023/05/last-stand-for-ivas-new-challenges-delays-as-army-debates-future-of-augmented-reality-goggles/.
34. Courtney Bacon, “IVAS Allows Maximum Mission Awareness in Transit,” U.S. Army, 10 January 2022, https://www.army.mil/article/253170/ivas_allows_maximum_mission_awareness_in_transit.
35. Roque, “Last Stand for IVAS?”
36. Author’s observation during a feedback session with soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division, 22 March 2022, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Soldiers had just completed field exercises using Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), version 1.0.
37. U.S. GAO, Weapons Systems Annual Assessment, 113–14.
38. “Anduril and Microsoft Partner to Advance Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Program for the U.S. Army,” Microsoft News, 11 February 2025, https://news.microsoft.com/2025/02/11/anduril-and-microsoft-partner-to-advance-integrated-visual-augmentation-system-ivas-program-for-the-u-s-army/.
39. Author’s observation, 22 March 2022.
40. Stacie Pettyjohn, Evolution Not Revolution: Drone Warfare in Russia’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine (Center for a New American Security, 2024), 9, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/evolution-not-revolution.
41. David Lamborn (colonel/commander, 2nd Light Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division), interview with author, 18 February 2025. Lamborn commanded the 2nd Mobile Brigade, which was part of the Army’s Transformation in Contact initiative.
42. Army Regulation 71-9, Warfighting Capabilities Determination (U.S. Government Publishing Office, 29 June 2022), 54, https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN31331-AR_71-9-000-WEB-1.pdf.
43. McGarry, DOD Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE), summary, 11, 18, 32.
44. Gettinger, Defense Primer.
45. Brabner, interview.
46. Brabner, interview.
47. Hollenbeck, “How to Transform the Army for Drone Warfare.” The author made the same point, in much the same words, in his earlier article, which attributes the observation to an article by James Rainey and Jim Greer.
48. Molloy, Drones in Modern Warfare, 57.
49. Rainey, “Continuous Transformation,” 3.
50. The Army uses as many as eighteen (depending on how one counts) types of capability requirements documents. Some are specifically for software, others are designed to allow rapid hardware prototyping, and so on. Often, for a given capability, the Army has several options. The choice of document type determines what rules apply.
51. J-8/Joint Capabilities Division, Manual for the Operation of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (U.S. Department of Defense, 30 October 2021), B-C-8. Regarding the performance attributes included in a CDD, para. 2.5.5.1.1. reads, “Sponsors should avoid over specification or inclusion of technical specifications as performance attributes.”
52. Richard Haddad, discussion with author via Microsoft Teams, 24 February 2025. Haddad previously served as requirements chief for Army Futures Command.
53. Rainey, “Continuous Transformation,” 13.
54. Rainey, “Continuous Transformation.” DOTMLPF-P stands for doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy.
55. Andrew F. Krepinevich, The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers (Yale University Press, 2023), 462, Kindle.
56. Hollenbeck, “How to Transform the Army for Drone Warfare.” The author adapted this full paragraph from his earlier article, retaining much of the original wording.
57. James G. Burton, The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard (Naval Institute Press, 1993), 133. The better-known 1998 HBO film, The Pentagon Wars, was adapted from this book.
58. Alistair MacDonald and Ievgeniia Sivorka, “Meet Bradley, the U.S. Army Veteran Ukrainian Soldiers Love,” Wall Street Journal, 26 September 2024, https://www.wsj.com/world/meet-bradley-the-u-s-army-veteran-ukrainian-soldiers-love-df7c5857.
59. Casey Perley (executive director, Army Applications Lab), discussion with author, 10 February 2024. Perley said an acquisition project manager may sometimes want to adopt a solution and have the budget but lack a validated requirement and be reluctant to “crack open” an existing requirement, at least for a long-running program like the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS).
60. Brett Sylvia, “Land-Based Fires in Large-Scale Combat Operations Hot Topic,” posted 3 December 2024 by Association of the U.S. Army, YouTube, 15:39–15:56, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf2D-Wc6POY. Maj. Gen Sylvia was explaining why Transformation in Contact is different from the Army’s traditional approach to capability development.
61. “George: Army Transformation Must Be Agile, Adaptive,” Association of the United States Army, 12 December 2024, https://www.ausa.org/news/george-army-transformation-must-be-agile-adaptive.
62. To Receive Testimony on the Department of Defense’s Posture for Supporting and Fostering Innovation Before the Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities on Accelerating Innovation for the Warfighter, 117th Cong. (6 April 2022) (statement of Michael Brown, Director, Defense Innovation Unit), 9, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/download/brown-statement-04/06/2022.
63. Jason Miller, “Army Lays Out High Level Concepts for Next-Gen C2,” Federal News Network, 18 December 2024, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/army/2024/12/army-lays-out-high-level-concepts-for-next-gen-c2/.
64. Joseph Cederstrom and Jeremy Magruder (Army Futures Command), telephone interview by author, 14 February 2025. Cederstrom has extensive experience as a warranted contracting officer.
65. Federal Acquisition Regulation, 48 C.F.R. 1.101 (2020); Authority of the Department of Defense to Carry Out Certain Prototype Projects, 10 U.S.C. § 4022 (2024).
66. Cederstrom and Magruder, telephone interview.
67. Cederstrom and Magruder, telephone interview.
68. Justin Lynch (project manager and business analyst), email to author, 12 March 2025. Lynch was a senior director of research and analysis for the Special Competitive Studies Project.
69. Jonathan Bodenhamer (colonel/project manager, Search, Track, Acquire, Radiate, Eliminate [STARE] Project Office), email to author, 3 March 2025.
70. Casey Perley, email to author, 4 March 2025. Perley was responding to Bodenhamer’s input.
71. Perley, email.
72. Ryan Nesrsta (colonel/project manager, Utility Helicopters Project Office), email to author, 28 February 2025.
73. Nesrsta, telephone discussion with author, 7 March 2025.
74. Neil Hollenbeck et al., “Thinking Differently About the Business of War,” Joint Force Quarterly 92 (22 January 2019): 56, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/1737468/thinking-differently-about-the-business-of-war/.

 

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