US Army's Doctrinal Shift: Attritable Drones Now Absorb First Contact
During a live-fire drill at Fort Campbell, the 101st Airborne sent drones ahead of ground troops in every breach scenario — before sappers, before scouts, before anyone whose life the Army would rather not lose to a $500 unmanned system.
image from GPT Image 1.5
The 101st Airborne Division tested what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been asking for: drones making first contact before any soldier sets foot in the kill zone.
In a live-fire exercise on March 12 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the 101st Airborne Division ran an operational rehearsal its leadership is calling a turning point. Working alongside the 5th Special Forces Group, Army UAS operators flew an MQ-1C Gray Eagle, a C100 small unmanned aircraft system, and an Attritable Battlefield Enabler 1.01 drone to clear the area ahead of ground troops. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Page Frazier, the exercise coordinator and a member of the 101st Robotics and Autonomous Integration Directorate, described the approach differently from any prior Army exercise: the unit always made first contact with a machine rather than with soldiers on the ground.
Before we sent a sapper to breach, we sent an Attritable Battlefield Enabler, Frazier said. Before we sent a tech to lase for laser guided munitions, we sent a Gray Eagle. Before we sent cavalry troops or light infantrymen to gather ground reconnaissance, we sent a UAS for medium-range reconnaissance. I dont think any other exercise has done that.
That sequencing — machine first, human second — is the operational fact that makes this exercise significant. It represents a doctrinal hypothesis being tested in live-fire conditions: that attritable autonomous systems can absorb the initial risk of a contact scenario.
The systems span a spectrum of cost and expendability. The MQ-1C Gray Eagle is an established platform. The C100 is a smaller tactical UAS. The Attritable Battlefield Enabler 1.01 is experimental and designed to be expendable — the name is the program: cheap enough to lose.
Brig. Gen. Travis McIntosh, deputy commanding general of operations for the 101st, framed the strategic logic: Drones are reshaping the geometry of the battlefield in real time. Distance and sanctuary no longer provide the protection they once did, and mass and speed of decision-making will increasingly be enabled by autonomy and artificial intelligence.
The exercise was explicitly run in response to a Hegseth directive. This demonstration was a direct answer to the secretary of war directive, Frazier said.
The budget context makes this more than an exercise. The FY2026 defense budget allocates $13.4 billion for autonomous systems — the first year DoD has dedicated a separate budget line for autonomy. Two days after the Fort Campbell exercise, Anduril announced a $20 billion Army contract for autonomous air and ground systems built around its Lattice software platform.
For the Army Reserve, the exercise was a learning moment. Sammy Stevens, a counter-UAS lead planner for USARC, described the shift in institutional mindset: During counterinsurgency operations everyone was used to looking down to identify improvised explosive devices; now we have to look up in the air.
The question the exercise cant fully answer is whether the tradeoff holds in contested electronic warfare environments — where GPS is jammed and autonomous systems face countermeasures. Fort Campbell was a proof of concept in permissive conditions.
What is clear is that the Army is no longer asking whether to integrate autonomous systems into assault sequences. It is asking how.
