- Marines in California are running a new drone pilot course hope to see 500 troops qualify each year.
- Students must master aerial navigation and safely packing payloads with explosives.
- The training comes as the Pentagon seeks fast drone adoption everywhere, learning from Ukraine.
West Coast Marines are learning how to operate attack drones in a new training course, part of a broader push to accelerate drone readiness across the force.
The new fast-paced crash course packs a lot into 15 days, teaching Marines how to fly the drones, handle aerial navigation, and safely prepare and deploy explosive payloads made with C-4.
Marines spend several days on a drone simulator before progressing to cheap, expendable, off-the-shelf drones. From there, students move on to more complex systems, including drones built in-house by instructors and the Marine Corps' Neros Archer drone. Neros received a $17 million contract from the service last year for around 8,000 of its small drones.
"The simulators allow them to develop the core skills that we can then transition to our smaller drone for them to refine," said 1st Lt. Braeden McClain, an infantry officer overseeing the course.
So far, the course has certified 75 Marines as attack drone operators and hopes to graduate 500 a year. These aren't formal military occupational specialties like the positions tied to larger drone platforms; instead, the focus is on spreading drone training across the force.
Much of the training focuses on mission execution and safety, McClain told Business Insider. Marines fly drones through makeshift PVC gates, testing flight dexterity and aerial navigation as they guide the aircraft to grid coordinates for a strike. The drills are deliberately team-based, reflecting lessons the Marine Corps has drawn from the war in Ukraine, McClain said.
Marines rotate through multiple roles — pilot, team leader, communications support, and payload preparation — while planning missions in detail, establishing checkpoints, and practicing "talking on target," the process of verbally guiding a drone operator onto an objective. Each role comes with challenges, such as factoring in payload weight, radio frequencies, and wind, among other things.
"We've noticed that really the issue that most Marines struggle with is not the actual flying of the drone itself; it's kind of some of the more fundamental concepts, like aerial navigation," McClain said. "Most Marines have never flown before, so now having them try to navigate through the air is a bit challenging." Having course instructors who were already hobby drone enthusiasts has been a boon, he said.
The training effort is part of a broader push to get American troops trained on drone operations as quickly as possible, a task that marks a sharp departure from the military's historically slow approach to adopting new technology. In recent months, the Pentagon has prioritized rapid defense modernization and closer collaboration with industry as battlefield lessons from Ukraine highlight how quickly drone warfare is evolving.
Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo directing the Pentagon to quickly overhaul drone acquisition and fielding processes in an effort to "unleash" US military drone dominance, including a push to field more than $1 billion worth of attack drones through 2028.
"Our acquisition system is designed to reduce acquisition risk to zero," Lt. Gen. Benjamin Watson, who oversees the Marine Corps' Training and Education Command, told reporters at the Modern Day Marine symposium last year. "We've got to field drones at scale in order to be able to pressurize our training, really to work through some of the real hard problems."
The Marine Corps began authorizing more widespread drone training late last year as part of that Pentagon-wide push, and it is now seeking to add 10,000 drones to its inventory over the coming year.
The First Marine Division program operates under the broader umbrella of the Corps' lead organization for drone training, the Attack Drone Team headquartered in Quantico, Virginia. The Corps stood the team up last year to help develop standardized training pipelines across the force.
"Right now, our focus is on rapidly building proficiency by sending Marines to a variety of training courses and increasing hands-on familiarization," Maj. Alejandro Tavizon, the headquarters company commander at Weapons Training Battalion, which oversees the Attack Drone Team, said last year. "Our goal is to ensure they can not only operate these systems effectively but also integrate them seamlessly into a team."
That emphasis on team-based drone employment, and on constantly absorbing battlefield lessons from the war in Ukraine, means the course will have to continuously evolve, something not routinely seen in US military training.
Such immediate evolution is common in Ukraine though, where drone schools are updating their lessons frequently, as often as every two weeks, to keep up with developments on the battlefield.
Shifts in drone warfare have become a cat-and-mouse game, with each new tactic forcing a rapid counter. Radio-frequency drones are now routinely jammed, and that electronic warfare has driven the emergence of fiber-optic drones that are largely resistant to interference.
"At this rate, we see a significant advancement every three to six months," McClain said, describing how quickly tactics and technology are changing. "Flexibility is definitely the name of the game."
