Weekly Note: Multi-Echelon sUAS Integration

Candid insights from the Army's "most hated unit"

Introduction

In Episode 96 of The Crucible – The JRTC Experience—“Drones in the Fight: sUAS at Echelon during LSCO”—Soldiers from the infamous Geronimo OPFOR unit offer a candid look at the Army’s still-nascent effort to not just field, but effectively employ sUASs. It’s a rare opportunity to hear directly from end users with a level of detail and honesty that’s hard to find elsewhere. I strongly encourage folks to follow this podcast series.

In this post, I break down four core challenge areas the panel identified:

• Multi-Echelon Coordination

• Targeting Process Integration

• Training Limitations

• Knowledge Management

After walking through those challenges, I share what I see as the most urgent capability needs the Army must address based on the first-hand insights from this episode.

My biggest takeaway: The Army’s doctrine development process is too slow to keep pace with the fast-moving sUAS landscape. The core challenges aren’t about technology—they’re about process. Units are innovating and adapting impressively on their own, but the Army lacks effective ways to capture and scale these solutions across the force at a cadence that can keep pace with the threat.

What’s needed is a mechanism that both empowers continued unit-level innovation and rapidly identifies, validates, and disseminates what works at the speed of relevance.

Multi-Echelon Coordination Challenges

Unlocking Squad‑Level ISR for Brigade‑Wide Effects

The panel identified how sUAS are empowering squads and platoons with ISR-T capabilities previously reserved for higher echelons. This forces a fundamental reassessment of how companies and below contribute to brigade and battalion objectives, and what these small units should handle independently. As LTC Price notes, "We've hyper-enabled companies and below with great capabilities, but a lot of times battalions and brigades are in the blind about what they're actually doing."

The discussion exposed an important gap: small units now possess ISR-T ranges (10km+) that extend far beyond the effective engagement ranges of their organic weapon systems. These lower echelons are discovering targets with brigade or division-level implications but lack standardized mechanisms to communicate this information efficiently upward.

Format Incompatibility

Different brigades develop their own reporting formats and chat protocols, creating communication barriers even between adjacent units. This prevents effective horizontal and vertical information sharing – a brigade can't easily pass targets to an adjacent brigade or process reports from subordinate battalions using different formats.

Information Overload

The panel highlighted how the volume of data overwhelms current systems: "Anybody with an end-user device on their chest just pumping information into a chat room" creates a "sushi conveyor belt" of information, where critical data gets lost among the noise. Fires cells particularly struggle to filter actionable targeting data from the flood of reports.

Echelon-Appropriate Authorities

The panel emphasized the need for clear "guard rails" defining what each echelon can decide independently versus what requires higher approval.

Targeting Process Integration

The podcast discussed the existing targeting cycle and how sUAS capabilities can be effectively incorporated. Below, I tried to piece together the broad elements of this process and the impact sUAS are having.

• Predict the enemy.
  Intelligence teams update an Event Template each day, forecasting likely enemy actions over the next 24–48 hours. Small UAS collect the real‑time cues that confirm or deny those predictions.

• Select key targets.
  Fires planners and the S‑2 shop identify High‑Payoff or High‑Threat assets whose loss directly benefits the brigade plan. Drones help find or strike those assets, especially when other sensors are limited.

• Ask focused questions.
  Commanders translate knowledge gaps into Priority Intelligence Requirements and assign drone tasks to answer them. A flight card for every quadcopter ensures no sortie is sent out without a clear purpose.

• Allocate sensors and set rules.
  Brigades mass drones in the most critical sectors, publish required engagement accuracy standards, and adjust Rules of Engagement only after crews demonstrate reliable vehicle‑recognition skills.

• Run the daily loop.
  Decide → Detect → Deliver → Assess, then feed the results back into the next day’s prediction cycle. When maintained, this rhythm makes small UAS an integral part of brigade planning and targeting process, rather than isolated gadgets with limited impact.

A key observation was that successful units moved beyond using sUAS opportunistically (the "sushi conveyor belt" approach) toward deliberate integration with higher echelon targeting priorities.

Training and Standardization Limitations

Proficiency Gap

Data from Ukraine shows startling disparities between trained and untrained operators: 10-15% hit rates for untrained personnel versus 70-80% for trained operators. This highlights the critical need for standardized training programs.

Vehicle Recognition Deficit

The panel noted a significant gap in target identification training: "We're no longer in a world where we outsource that training to somebody else." While attack aviation crews receive extensive training in identifying friend or foe, similar training isn't standardized for sUAS operators despite them employing similar strike capabilities.

Home Station Constraints

FAA restrictions and airspace limitations severely impact a unit's ability to build proficiency before deployments. Units are experimenting with enclosed netting systems and other workarounds, but these address only part of the training need. That said, constant home station training is critical.

Process Perishability

Even the OPFOR at JRTC, which conducts monthly iterations, struggles with process consistency: "It's perishable... when we go into this March rotation we're going to be like 'man this is hard again, we don't know how to do this again'." This challenge is magnified for operational units with fewer repetitions.

Critical Knowledge Management Gap

The panel repeatedly emphasized the lack of an enterprise-wide knowledge sharing system for sUAS lessons. CW3 Rader observed that "the collective group has the answer, there's just not a lot of dialogue or a centralized repository of information... it's kind of a little bit of stove pipes of excellence."

The core problem isn't technological but procedural - as units innovate independently, effective practices can remain isolated:

• "We're not starting from zero here... look at the Ukraine-Ukraine conflict right now"

• "If you haven't checked out Preston Stewart on YouTube... he really looks at the tactical application of some of the small UAS systems"

• "Nobody's coming to save us on this problem... we can't wait for an Army solution"

Most Critical Capability Needs

Based on the panel's discussion, several desired capabilities emerged:

• Cross-Echelon Information Integration: A unified platform merging Tactical Assault Kit (TAK), Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P), and chat feeds to create a common operational picture. As LTC Price noted, "We don't have good synthesis of information coming from a myriad of platforms into a common COP."

• Information Filtering Systems: Tools that can process the overwhelming chat traffic from field devices to prevent information overload in fires cells. CW3 Rader described the need for "Knowledge Management... understanding where we have the peoples, the tools, and the processes in the right place so we can really parse the right information."

• Coordinated Planning Tools: Systems that translate Priority Intelligence Requirements into daily drone flight schedules with integrated airspace deconfliction. The panel emphasized the need for battalions to publish "ISR synchronization matrices" so higher headquarters knows "he's got to fly this time frame, this route."

• Standardized Training Systems: Certification protocols similar to what attack aviation crews receive for target recognition. As LTC Thornell noted, "Are we training people to the same level?" when comparing infantry soldiers operating attack drones to aviation personnel operating similar weapons.

• Battlefield Visualization in Three Dimensions: Tools to help company commanders "look at our tactical tasks in three dimensions" and understand whether they control terrain "up to 1,000 ft AGL."

• Edge AI - For automated target identification that flags likely enemy vehicles while leaving final confirmation to a human.

Conclusion: The Critical Gap

The core challenge isn’t technology—it’s enterprise learning at speed. As the panel noted, “Ukraine didn’t just all of a sudden happen—it was thousands of iterations of trial and error.”

The Army’s current doctrinal process struggles to keep pace with the speed of tactical innovation. Units are figuring things out on their own, but there’s no fast, reliable way to capture and spread those lessons across the force.

To keep up, the Army needs more than new tools—it needs a new way to share what works, standardize it quickly, and get it into the hands of the next unit before they deploy.

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