Machines Made First Contact: The Army's Fort Campbell Exercise and the Doctrinal Shift It Confirmed
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.
Primary sources: U.S. Army official account of the March 12 Fort Campbell exercise; FY2026 budget documents; Anduril $20B Army contract announced March 13, 2026.