Realizing America’s Drone Revolution
Two years ago, I represented the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab at the Defense Innovation Unit summit in Warsaw. A Ukrainian commander there poked me in the chest and said, “Stop sending us your American drones. They’re shit. They don’t work on the modern battlefield.” He wasn’t talking about some baby start-up. He was talking about one of America’s top drone manufacturers — a well-known brand in the halls of the Pentagon with a long-standing program of record, a spot on the “blue list,” retired generals on its advisory board, and a bank account packed with hundreds of millions from venture capital.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but it’s a natural result of the incentives of Pentagon processes as they exist today.
Despite the Defense Innovation Unit’s best efforts to sharpen the blunt instrument of the Department of Defense’s drone acquisitions, the system remains deeply flawed, overly bureaucratic, and resistant to innovation. As a result, American warfighters lag behind in crucial drone capabilities. The United States needs a competitive, real-world evaluation model. With humble but urgent intent, I, alongside other key veterans and servicemembers, founded the U.S. National Drone Association to deliver the solutions we believe are desperately needed.
What has informed our approach?
There are some historical examples that illustrate how external competitive pressures succeeded in forcing military modernization: namely, believe it or not, the National Rifle Association in the late 19th century. We are holding open competitions, involving both military units and civilian innovators, to publicly reveal shortcomings and drive necessary reform, thereby moving away from bureaucratic gatekeeping that leads to situations like the one I described above. The ultimate goal is equipping frontline troops rapidly with reliable and effective drone systems, directly aligning acquisitions practices with the urgency of battlefield realities.
The National Rifle Association of 1871
Ten years after the Civil War, the Army’s acquisition chief, Col. James Ripley, dismissed the acquisition of a new technology, “it’s just a phase…none as good as the U.S. musket”. He was referring to the invention of the machine gun. We know how the rest of that history plays out on 20th-century modern warfare.
Union veterans Col. William C. Church and Gen. George Wingate were concerned about the poor marksmanship exhibited by Northern soldiers during the Civil War. And they had been studying the massive impact of breach-loading rifles used by Germans to decimate the French army in the Franco-Prussian War.
After ten years of advocacy and resistant bureaucracy, they had had enough. Six generals, six colonels, three majors, and two captains founded the National Rifle Matches in 1871 to shame the U.S. military into modernizing itself. Writing in the Army and Navy Journal that summer, the officers wrote,
An association should be organized in this city to promote and encourage rifle-shooting on a scientific basis. The National Guard is to-day too slow in getting about this reform. Private enterprise must take up the matter and push it into life.
The new association promoted rifle practice and organized shooting competitions, such as the inaugural tournament at Creedmoor Rifle Range in 1873. By 1903, the organization’s efforts led Congress to allocate funds for national rifle and pistol matches, which were eventually managed by the War Department. The National Rifle Association’s advocacy contributed to the establishment of the Civilian Marksmanship Program, further solidifying its impact on military preparedness and rifle proficiency. President Teddy Roosevelt described the National Rifle Association as America’s third line of defense.
The Marine Corps’ initial marksmanship performance in the first decades of competition was far from legendary, largely due to the lack of sufficient training areas. In 1899, following the Spanish-American War, Marine Corps Commandant Maj. Gen. Charles Heywood was dismayed to learn that only 89 out of 6,000 Marines had qualified as expert marksmen. As a result, he commissioned the development of rifle training ranges in Maryland and entered the first competitive team in the 1901 matches held by the National Rifle Association.
Out of 11 teams, the Marine Corps placed sixth.
Over the following years, the Marine Corps doubled its efforts to upgrade its training programs and rifle technology, leveraging the expertise of civilian sharpshooters (most notably “Doc” Scott, a Maryland dentist) and steadily improved the team’s performance. Stipends and skill badges were authorized by the Marine Corps to further incentivize marksmanship skill improvement.
By 1917, the Marine Corps’ competitive team had placed second at the national matches. But earning the trophy at the national matches was, and is, far from the point. In June of 1918, members of that same competitive team were laying in prone positions on Hill 142 in Belleau Wood, France, deployed with the 4th Marine Brigade in World War I, calmly picking off Germans at 600 yards. Legend has it that their German foes cursed at them, calling them “Teufelshunde” or “devil dogs,” creating that now beloved nickname for the Marines.
Today, if drones were exchanged for rifles and Belleau Wood were exchanged for something akin to the fight that Ukrainian troops now wage, how would a U.S. Army or Marine Corps infantry squad perform, currently equipped with weaponry possessing a maximum effective distance of 1,000 yards? Chances are Russian drone operators, competing regularly in Russia’s “Dronnitsa” drone competitions and striking Ukrainian targets with first-person-view drones at distances of over 30km, would be the devil dogs of the day, unless the Defense Department is forced to change course, fast.
The U.S. National Drone Association of 2025.
History, unfortunately, is repeating itself. Clear signals are emerging from the fog of wars being fought overseas that warn the United States to move faster to adopt new technology and tactics. Today, even after first-person-view drones have dominated the Russo-Ukrainian War, there is still resistance to broad acquisition and integration of these systems in the U.S. military.
But it’s not the fault of the U.S. military units, nor the fault of American drone companies trying to put drones that work into their hands.
Squad leaders shouldn’t have to be Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Department of Defense policy experts to get their hands on emerging drone technologies. Yet across the nation, rifle squads and maneuver units across the Marine Corps and Army are told “no” to integrating drones into their training due to a dirty laundry list of stubborn, restrictive policies written, and never revised, over the past 15 years.
American drone technology innovators shouldn’t have to be government acquisition and lobbying experts to get the best drones in the hands of warfighters.
The U.S. National Drone Association was formed by active, reserve, and retired military members as a non-profit effort to host independent competition, through drone crucible events, evaluating both tactics and technologies in an objective experimentation environment. We announced the first Drone Crucible Competition to be held on Independence Day and invited the British Army Drone Team to come challenge the Defense Department. The Drone Crucible Competition will test new drone tactics and technologies for infantry squads. Squads from each service will evaluate how drones can modernize their ability to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy.
Unlike the adoption of rifles in the late 19th century, the Marine Corps was the first to step up to the challenge.
The Marine Corps Attack Drone Team was formed immediately in response to the announcement, a joint effort between the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and Weapons Training Battalion, Training Command. Vice President J.D. Vance beelined straight to fly with the drone team during his visit to Quantico in March 2025.
Over the past three months, we have seen the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team wage a calm but urgent war on Defense Department bureaucracy, fighting tooth and nail to get their hands on the drones donated for their use by technology companies sponsoring the Drone Crucible and for more permissive training environments on board Marine Corps installations.
The Army was close behind, sending the 75th Ranger Regiment to join the field at the drone crucible, armed with the latest drone technology provided by Special Operations Command. I hope the Army will announce the establishment of its formal competitive program in the coming months.
Both the Army and Marine Corps, alongside industry and academia, will compete in an open and unrestrained environment, spearheading experimentation on behalf of their services. By introducing an Industry Drone Team into the field of play (the equivalent of the National Rifle Association’s Civilian Marksmanship Program in the 19th and early 20th century) we aim to keep the competition objective and competitive, allowing insights from the nation’s top technology companies to inform the simulated battlespace.
A 14-year-old drone racing champion, with the luxury of time spent on practice instead of paperwork, will probably shame the service’s teams. A community college robotics student, spending more time on prototyping instead of patents, may shame the U.S. defense industrial base.
A Better Way to Compete
The military says it trains like it fights, but it does not buy or acquire technology with that same life-or-death urgency. If acquisitions truly reflected wartime realities, gatekeepers would become guides, steering promising technologies through the system rather than blocking them. “You didn’t make the approved list, try again next year” would become, “Your system has potential. Let’s get you qualified — I’ll walk you through the process.”
But today, the system is designed to exclude rather than include. Out of a billion-dollar budget allocated to the Defense Innovation Unit, only two contractors manage the entire drone qualification process, known as the “Blue UAS Cleared List.” The result? American drone companies struggle against artificial barriers, urgently attempting to replace China’s global dominance but hampered at every step.
A Call to Action
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Congress can step in to fund more expansive trials and competitions with fewer bureaucratic obstacles. Long-term financing would come with built-in checkpoints, allowing rapid integration or abandonment of drone technologies as combat scenarios evolve. Each military service would be required to clearly demonstrate — publicly and consistently — how they select emerging technologies based on ongoing, realistic battlefield evaluations.
The secretary of defense can order an immediate overhaul of outdated training regulations that currently hinder drone integration, requiring a list of every policy that stands between military units and the ability to test drone technologies as easily as they practice marksmanship with their rifles. Any regulatory obstacle, whether internal or imposed by agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration or the Federal Communications Commission, would be documented, and their responsible officials identified by name. For issues outside the Defense Department’s authority, the secretary should seek a presidential directive instructing these agencies to swiftly align their policies with battlefield requirements.
Once confirmed, the under secretary of defense for acquisitions and sustainment can work to eliminate the cumbersome, Pentagon-level approval currently required for experimental drone systems. Operational commanders would have the authority to independently approve and test promising new drones in realistic scenarios. To be clear, this doesn’t mean bypassing established security laws or purchasing equipment from adversarial nations en masse for use in real-world operational environments. It means allowing commanders the flexibility to assess emerging technologies immediately and pragmatically, ensuring troops can evaluate tomorrow’s battlefield threats today, rather than waiting months or years for a bureaucratic nod.
It is time to openly challenge industry innovators and military drone teams to face off head-to-head, using real-world competitions to objectively measure drone effectiveness. If commercially available drones outperform current military systems, leaders can identify exactly who or what allowed obsolete technologies to reach U.S. troops and make swift corrections. Bureaucrats need to become facilitators, backed by resources from offices designed explicitly for rapid innovation, ensuring successful systems get quickly into the hands of servicemembers.
Warfighters deserve reliable equipment, clear-eyed policies, and the tools they need to win the wars we ask them to fight.
Nathan Ecelbarger is the president of the U.S. National Drone Association, with a career spanning military service, state and federal law enforcement, public policy, successful entrepreneurship and business, education technology, military technology investment, and philanthropy. Following his board and C-suite level success in business and philanthropy, Ecelbarger returned to service as a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserves. The opinions expressed in this article are his alone.
Image: Midjourney
