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In 2006, the U.S. Army’s 25th Combat Aviation Brigade deployed to Iraq, where it paired Task Force ODIN (Observe, Detect, Identify, and Neutralize) with an Apache battalion from the 82nd Airborne Division — a first-of-its-kind teaming of attack helicopters with drones. These units combined manned and unmanned sensors to identify and destroy improvised explosive devices and high-value targets, leveraging drones to fill gaps in traditional rotary wing aviation. Col. Jamie LaValley, at the time a captain with the 82nd, told me he felt he was witnessing “the future of warfare.” “Man, Army Aviation is on to something,” he recalls thinking. “It was apparent that a mass of sensors and weapon systems on a host of platforms provided a decisive advantage.”
Two decades later, however, Army Aviation has made little progress in manned-unmanned teaming, and in 2025 ended a failed ten-year effort to advance interoperability between AH-64 Apache helicopters and RQ-7 Shadow drones. LaValley, who later commanded a squadron tasked with this integration, saw the lack of progress firsthand. “I was sure the effectiveness [that he saw in Iraq] would translate into future fielding of weaponized drones … and oddly, it didn’t. In fact, we seemed to go backwards.”
To meet the needs of the modern battlefield, the Trump administration has called for the United States to “unleash drone dominance” by streamlining acquisitions, reindustrializing, and “accelerating AI integration.” The Pentagon’s latest budget request includes a record $54.6 billion for autonomous systems. But Army Aviation’s failure to modernize shows that the bottlenecks to adopting and diffusing emerging technologies go well beyond production, procurement, and Pentagon-level policy. Real transformation demands a cultural shift away from the familiar, highly skilled, and empowered soldiers, and the willingness to experiment, fail, and say so. The branch’s stagnation is a case study in what happens when those conditions are absent.
In 2016, I was assigned to one of the Army’s newly reorganized air cavalry squadrons. Through the Aviation Restructure Initiative, these units fielded manned and unmanned aviation assets under the same battalion-level command for the first time, with Apaches and Shadows organized to fight in collaborative teams. Maj. Gen. Michael Lundy — the commanding general of the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence at the time — called manned-unmanned teaming a “critical component of how we will fight in the future.”
Given the success of Task Force ODIN a decade prior, one might expect manned-unmanned teaming to have come a long way in the intervening ten years. Yet today, air cavalry squadrons are no more, disbanded by the recent Army Transformation Initiative — sound familiar? — and the Shadow has been retired.
Three dynamics explain the Army’s failure to advance manned-unmanned teaming, offering insights into the challenges the U.S. military faces in adopting unmanned and autonomous systems at scale. First, cultural inertia led Army Aviation to frame unmanned systems as accessories to manned aviation rather than a new form of combat power. Second, the Army underestimated the on-the-ground integration complexities of drone and helicopter platoons fighting together and the talent needed to make it work. Third, the spirit of stubbornness throughout the ranks — encouraged and incentivized by the institution itself — offered few paths for honest reflection and actionable feedback.
Army Aviation suffered from a failure of imagination, with leaders only able to conceive of unmanned systems as tools to support the manned aviation paradigm they already knew.
A.T. Ball, a retired colonel who commanded the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade in Iraq, told me that by employing manned and unmanned assets collaboratively, his unit increased mission success rates — defined as killing the enemy with no American casualties — by as much as 15 percent. Ball stressed that the task force succeeded because of its flexibility. They molded what was available to meet the mission and empowered their soldiers to innovate. They modified unmanned systems with hardware and software upgrades on the fly and developed new capabilities, like hastily equipping drones to extend radio transmissions where ground relay towers couldn’t reach. Ball shared his lessons with Army leadership, but rather than build on his unit’s example, Army Aviation relegated drones to a support role for manned aviators. “There were vested interests in maintaining the status quo,” Ball says.
A decade later, the Army made the Shadow the centerpiece of its manned-unmanned teaming ambitions, a strategically incoherent decision that was simultaneously backward- and forward-looking. Shadows were paired with Apaches as a “bridging strategy” to fill the scout role left vacant by the retiring OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter. Meanwhile, the Pentagon was calling manned-unmanned teaming “essential” to its shifting priorities toward the Asia-Pacific and operations in contested environments. The Army wanted a drone that could simply make the Apache’s job easier, and the Shadow was familiar, available, and a cheaper option to fulfill that mission than an armed system like the MQ-1C Gray Eagle. Manufacturer Textron touted the Shadow’s interoperability, including features like live video-sharing in the cockpit and transferring control of the Shadow to the front seat of the Apache.
Task Force ODIN had, in fact, used a prior generation Shadow, but only in a limited capacity, with continuous technical modifications to meet battlefield needs and in combination with armed drones. Rather than use manned-unmanned teaming to push the branch forward, the senior leadership’s penchant for known quantities and aversion to undermining its pilot-centered history led to a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars spent forcing a limited system to shape the future of attack aviation.
Beyond cultural resistance, the practical realities of merging manned and unmanned aviation revealed deep organizational and technical incompatibilities. Shadow platoons were deprioritized in terms of talent and resources. Traditional aviation platoons are led by officers with college degrees and rigorous flight school training and manned by warrant officers with the same flight training and decades of technical and tactical expertise. Meanwhile, drone operators are enlisted soldiers with less demanding training and lower educational requirements, subjected to the low pay and menial taskings of others at their rank. Drone platoons are led by warrant officers with technical expertise, but no requirement for experience as drone operators. These talent disparities strained cooperation, exacerbated by the two groups receiving their foundational training on opposite ends of the country — unmanned systems in Arizona and manned aviation in Alabama.
Technical and physical mismatches between the aircraft compounded the problem. The Shadow’s slow takeoff sequence left it unable to keep pace with Apache crews prepared to launch at a moment’s notice. Shadows couldn’t fly in wind conditions that Apaches routinely operated in. While air cavalry squadrons trained to maneuver undetected and fly from austere environments, the Shadow had an infamously large acoustic signature (often compared to a flying lawnmower) and required a runway so robust that, if not readily available, had to be constructed. Meanwhile, faulty cockpit integration from basic oversights like antenna positioning left Apache crews with little inclination to work with the Shadow — especially given their already high cognitive load.
Risk aversion made things even worse. Pushing the Shadow to its limits was necessary if it was going to prove useful, and the aircraft’s shortfalls made crashes and hard landings inevitable. Yet rather than accept this cost and acknowledge the difference between incidents in manned helicopters — where a multimillion-dollar aircraft and live crews are at risk — and those involving cheaper systems with no crewmembers, units conducted nearly identical crash investigations. Whereas drones in Ukraine derive value from their attritability, and Task Force ODIN demonstrated the upside to experimentation, the Army spent a decade applying a level of scrutiny to Shadow operations that only disincentivized iterative learning.
Manned-unmanned teaming, as Army Aviation envisioned it, was unworkable. The Army held drone units to manned aviation standards while giving them less-expert crews and an aircraft unsuited for the future fight — and even the one it was originally built for. Some squadrons deploying to the Middle East chose to leave their Shadows behind rather than suffer the headache. These contradictions merely hardened the Army’s resolve to press on.
Soldiers often persevere because of their stubborn refusal to give up, but institutions can fail for the same reason, particularly when they lack proper feedback channels. The Shadow’s limitations were evident from the start, yet Army Aviation leaders continued to press interoperability as a priority for the branch’s future, and those at the unit level reluctantly obliged.
While working on this mission across multiple brigades, there was no clear path for tactical-level leaders to provide candid feedback on our troubled experience. When field grade officers questioned the project, those more senior ascribed subpar performance to poor leadership or lack of effort. Meanwhile, those at the battalion and company level powered on and feigned progress, encouraged by incentives that reward those who persist and report success. In 2021, my squadron was named the top Army Aviation battalion, due in large part to our dutiful effort to make a doomed mission succeed. We managed to take manned-unmanned teaming further than any other unit, becoming the first to qualify Apache and Shadow crews together at the Army’s highest aerial gunnery level. But doing so required a training environment contrived to accommodate the Shadow’s limits. We delivered exactly what the Army asked for, but it was asking for the wrong thing.
Teaming helicopters and drones is just one of many ways the Pentagon plans to proliferate unmanned systems across the force. But Army Aviation is the institutional home for all Army unmanned systems programs: How it thinks about manned-unmanned teaming will have wide-ranging impacts. And the failure modes are not specific to this use case. Culture, talent, and feedback will unavoidably shape how successfully all service components integrate unmanned systems.
Today’s acquisitions overhaul may deliver better drones, but the failure to institute meaningful organizational change is fundamentally a people problem. The cultural dismissal of unmanned systems as subordinate to manned aviation, the absence of feedback mechanisms, and operational oversights stemmed from human-level failures the Army must resolve to integrate unmanned systems at scale.
The disparity between helicopter and drone crews showed the inextricable link between expertise and mission effectiveness. Talent, like new technologies themselves, must be diffused throughout the entire force. Existing efforts, like the Tech Force or direct commissioning tech executives, focus on talent gaps at the top while missing the ground level. The Army recently created AI and robotics career paths, but these programs will fall short on scale. The AI concentration comes with “rigorous graduate education” — while the Defense Department cuts ties with top universities — and robotics technicians will only be assigned at brigade level and above. Policies to accelerate the Direct Commission Program for technology experts could be promising, but these programs have commissioned fewer than 50 officers each year, typically for non-combat arms branches. These efforts may suffice for the current drone fleet, but not one that demands hundreds of thousands or even millions of unmanned systems, as the Pentagon aspires.
The availability of agile, technically capable tactical-level soldiers will dictate the edge on the battlefield, especially as unmanned systems evolve. In Ukraine, one analyst estimates that 80% of drone success depends on pilot skill. Others note the demand for frontline engineers to manage the constant updates required to compete against the latest countermeasures. Ukraine has over 30 schools and centers training drone operators, with the head of one school calling it “impossible” to teach certain skills in as short as a month. Meanwhile, the Army’s Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course is only three weeks long, and its class size last August was just 28 soldiers.
With the Shadow, the Army viewed drone operators and maintainers as inferior to their manned counterparts, a mistake it cannot afford to continue making as it fields increasingly advanced systems. To attract and retain the necessary talent, the services should align the rank, pay, and duties of those working with these systems with the demands of their roles. Drone platoons should be structured similarly to other high-performing units like manned aviation platoons and Special Forces teams: led by officers with expertise in the systems they command, supported by warrant officers with deep technical knowledge, and filled with rigorously selected enlisted soldiers. As unmanned and autonomous systems grow more capable, each operator’s judgment carries more weight — making the caliber of that soldier increasingly critical.
Finding enough talent will require pulling from multiple sources, but some clear pipelines exist. The Army is cutting 6,500 aviation positions over the next two years, shedding officers and warrant officers already trained in airspace management and rapid tactical decision-making. The Pentagon should financially incentivize downsized aviators, along with the many promising officers preparing to leave the service each year, to move into drone billets rather than walk out the door. It also needs to expand its unmanned systems qualification courses, while demanding selectivity and rigor closer to that of flight school and elite programs like Special Forces Assessment and Selection. This will be costly, requiring congressional action and bureaucratic effort to create commissioned officer career paths for unmanned systems and retention bonuses. But there is precedent in Congress for supporting significant force structure overhauls to improve drone adoption. For an administration demanding record spending and priding itself on cutting red tape, these steps could be feasible with sufficient willpower.
Ground-level leaders need ample opportunities to articulate real-world battlefield needs and expose where technologies that may succeed in controlled demonstrations falter in real conditions, as the Shadow did. A promising model is emerging where Army units rapidly build and test new technologies in live training environments. But what will determine whether this generation of initiatives succeeds is not the mere existence of experimentation, but the scale and honesty of the feedback.
The value of these efforts will also diminish without sufficient access to training environments where units can fly, crash, and iterate at tempo. The Army needs dedicated drone ranges with the airspace and frequency access needed to train many systems simultaneously in realistic environments against active electronic warfare threats — something it currently lacks at scale.
Once fielded, warfighters need structured channels to provide candid feedback, and senior leaders must be willing to accept failure and pivot quickly. Professional military education, like the Captain’s Career Course, should dedicate time to critical assessment of emerging technologies. The Pentagon could also create platforms for soldiers to submit attributable or anonymous critiques without fear of reprisal. Crucially, the military must reward candor: Officer evaluations and promotions that incentivize reporting success over identifying failure will continue to produce the silence that let Army Aviation spin its wheels on manned-unmanned teaming for a decade.
Finally, units need the freedom to discard obsolete tactics and shape future doctrine. Ukraine has demonstrated the vulnerabilities of exquisite manned helicopters to small drones, air defense, and electronic warfare. Despite acknowledging this reality, at the Association of the U.S. Army conference last October, Maj. Gen. Clair Gill — the commanding general of the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence — affirmed the branch’s commitment to its historical strengths. “Everything we’re flying right now is going to be on the ramp for a long time,” he said, asserting that the United States must not take the lessons of Ukraine too far. “[U]sing the night, using the terrain, using the degraded visual environment, we’ve got some pretty exquisite capabilities.” While the instinct to avoid over-generalizing from one conflict is valid, it risks obscuring the fundamental lesson — that a military’s strength today lies in its flexibility to improvise, innovate, and adapt.
Money can buy better drones, but it can’t convince an institution to use them effectively. Only changes in how the force thinks, trains, and listens can do that. Without addressing these cultural and operational realities, blindly accelerating the adoption of new technologies risks another stagnant decade where the tools change but the Army doesn’t.
Jake Steckler is a research scholar at GovAI. He previously worked as a Senate staffer, volunteered with organizations supporting the frontlines in Ukraine, and served as an Army aviation officer. He holds a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Military Academy, a Master of Public Administration from Harvard, and a Master of Business Administration from MIT.
Image: U.S. Army
