AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The war in Ukraine is dragging on. Each side is losing ground, then gaining ground. And at the center of that fight are drones. High in the sky, they drop bombs on troops and armor. They spy on targets with an unblinking eye. And they have caught the attention of the U.S. military as it prepares its own future fights.
NPR's Tom Bowman recently watched an Army exercise in Louisiana and joins us now. Hi, Tom.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: So do you get the feeling that the U.S. military is learning a lot of lessons from the war in Ukraine?
BOWMAN: You know, Ailsa, they are, and this is really the first major war where you have drones playing a vital role. You know, some military experts I talk with are comparing it to other technological advancements we've seen in past wars that were a leap forward, like the machine gun in World War I.
CHANG: Interesting. OK. And I'm guessing that drones were also front and center in this Army exercise that you watched at Fort Johnson in Louisiana, right?
BOWMAN: That's right. They were, and it was - they were used by an Army unit out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, a brigade of the 101st Air Assault Division, and also the resident opposition force, called OpFor, at this training base deep in the Louisiana woods. So they use them as well. And there was this kind of cat and mouse game with drones. Top Army leaders were there as well, and all said we're seeing the future. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRONE WHIRRING)
BOWMAN: The drone rises high into the air. It's a quadcopter - four rotors on a plastic base no bigger than a dinner plate. In seconds, it's more than 100 feet above us.
JAMES STULTZ: Yes, James Stultz, I'm the brigade commander.
BOWMAN: Colonel James Stultz stands in the woods, his face smeared with camouflage paint like the several thousand soldiers under his command, along with some 100 drones. He knows they are both a blessing and a curse. They can spot his enemy, but they have drones too, so his command post in the training area, called the box, looks like a few humps covered in green netting.
STULTZ: It is super small, and it smells really bad 'cause we've been in the box for about nine days - pretty sour. Come on in.
BOWMAN: It's small for a reason.
STULTZ: So when he flies over, he doesn't see a large tent complex that looks like a command post. So he can't tell what this is. And so he has to either send ground forces to confirm or deny, or he just has to watch us. And so we're trying to blend in with all the other entities on the battlefield. A needle in a stack of needles.
BOWMAN: When Stultz served in Afghanistan, the Army had the luxury of living in large bases with massive buildings and dining halls, huge radar dishes and antenna farms.
STULTZ: We weren't worried that the Taliban or whoever anti-Afghan forces were hunting us.
BOWMAN: That's because the Taliban on rare occasions used some crude drones, but they had nothing like the swarms of drones sent into the skies by the Ukrainians and the Russians.
The size of a command post isn't the only change now in warfare. Drones can also detect electronic emissions - those unseen waves from a radio, a cell phone, even a Fitbit watch or an electric razor.
STULTZ: We didn't really care about our electronic magnetic spectrum emissions there in Afghanistan, right? Because...
BOWMAN: And that will change with a more sophisticated enemy like the Chinese military.
STULTZ: We do know, in a large-scale combat operation, that they are, that the enemy that we may be facing are absolutely collecting on that spectrum.
BOWMAN: And the enemy knows the bigger the electronic signature, the more important the target, like a brigade headquarters with the top leaders. So those lumps of camouflage that serve as his command post, they emit no electronic emissions. Those emissions that keep the command post, or CP, connected, they're found instead some 100 yards away.
Chief Warrant Officer Vidal Perez explains it all. Instead of massive communications trucks they used in the past, now it's just a Humvee, not only small, but fast.
VIDAL PEREZ: We're able to remove them off that Wi-Fi and hot spots and plug them directly into our network. So the CP no longer has any of that. Our only time constraint would be running the fiber.
BOWMAN: The fiber cable to the command post - and Perez and his fellow soldiers say they're able to have a small presence, so a drone would not sense they are really part of a command post.
PEREZ: They haven't been able to find us yet.
BOWMAN: It's kind of hard to believe.
PEREZ: We found it a little hard too.
BOWMAN: Yeah.
PEREZ: But they haven't.
BOWMAN: And their drones? Captain Charles O'Hagan is holding one - all black, with blades and gadgets attached to it. It looks like a high school science experiment.
CHARLES O'HAGAN: This is a drone. It's a quadcopter. It's small. We have a Wi-Fi adapter here and then a power source.
BOWMAN: The drone can not only go after the enemy force, but help track the best route for his soldiers to attack.
O'HAGAN: The infantry battalions can then pull that down and understand, hey, this route supported two ISVs, one Humvee and one high-mobility trailer. So that just gives options in terms of their avenues of approach.
BOWMAN: The captain also has a bag of high-tech tricks - decoys, the size of a playing card. They can spread them out to mimic those electronic emissions, make that opposing force, called Geronimo, think they're hitting a prize target, like that headquarters.
O'HAGAN: So when Geronimo flew - overflew us, they would not have a clear picture of what we look like on the battlefield, and that worked.
BOWMAN: The soldiers are here for two weeks of training and are now about nine days in. Tonight is a key event. They'll attack a mock village a few miles away, try to take it from that opposition force. No real bullets are used. Each soldier is equipped with little knobs on their uniform. They light up when they're hit. It's basically laser tag.
UNIDENTIFIED RADIO OPERATOR: For line three, the attack had a contact departed on timeline with two 864s arriving...
BOWMAN: Senior leaders listen to the radio chatter and monitor the fight in a control center with large video screens. There's a mass of blue diamond icons for the 101st, red for the OpFors. The soldiers start to move by road, by helicopter. In the end, it didn't go well for the 101st.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)
BOWMAN: They couldn't mass enough troops to take the village. And the drones, they virtually destroyed some of Colonel Stultz's counter-artillery radar.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARCHING FOOTSTEPS)
BOWMAN: A few miles away in a parking lot sits the future - a mechanical dog with an assault rifle fastened to its back. It can search a house or a building so a soldier isn't threatened. There's a large metal storage box, seemingly innocent until a button is pushed and rises up a pack of missiles and, of course, drones.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRONIC BEEPING)
BOWMAN: What we got here?
GREGORY KITT: What we got here? So this is called the Seeker. This is actually 3D printed for less than $700. It'll carry a 1 1/2- to 3-pound payload.
BOWMAN: Chief Warrant Officer Gregory Kitt is a burly Green Beret out of Fort Carson, Colo. He points to another drone that can fit in your palm. There's one that looks like a toy rocket. Still another is a quadcopter, like the one we saw in the woods.
KITT: We've got some other little guys to show you. Like, just the size - this is the size that the Ukrainians are using, that they carry the little anti-army munitions on them. And with these, this is what's popping those T-90s, all the tanks over there.
BOWMAN: The T-90 - that's the main Russian battle tank. Lessons learned from Ukraine - that's given the Army a sense of urgency about drone warfare. Kitt served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he says having these drones would have been a real game changer.
KITT: When I look at it now, I wish I'd have had some of this because we wouldn't have had to send guys into dangerous situation. Guys got hurt, hitting IEDs. I could have sent a drone in.
CHANG: Thank you for taking us there, Tom. You mentioned that senior Army leaders were there for this exercise. Did you talk with them about when other units will be going through this kind of training?
BOWMAN: Yes. You know, the top Army officer, General Randy George, was there, and he said he wants more and more soldiers to go through this training. And the Army says it will take years, however, to outfit the force with all this high-tech gear, but analysts say they have to move quickly because adversaries are adapting much faster.
CHANG: That is NPR's Tom Bowman. Thank you so much, Tom.
BOWMAN: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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