Enough drones, not enough pilots
The deadline for putting a one-way attack drone in every Army squad is the end of this month. This week the Army said it has the volume. Col. Gregory Merkl, who runs Drone Dominance at Army headquarters, said the service has fielded 10,000 drones and is fielding 30,000 more, enough for the squad level. Units have accepted 12,080 aircraft from the first Gauntlet alone.
Then he named the gap. "Where we still have some work to do, candidly, is getting everybody trained at the appropriate level." Qualified pilots have not reached the squads. An Army spokesperson added that the drones themselves have not reached every squad either, and that the Army will never have enough attritable drones.
The next 60,000 are already ordered
On September 15 the Pentagon posted Gauntlet 2 results: 1,858 sorties, 23 platforms, 19 companies, and every long-range platform reaching 15 kilometers, compared with 24 percent reaching 10 kilometers in the first round. The department plans to buy about 60,000 drones from this pool and more than 200,000 across all phases by 2027.
The supply problem is being solved. The bottleneck has moved to the people and processes that turn an airframe into a capability.
What does not come in the box
Each drone arrives with its controller, batteries, and the vendor's ground app. The unit has to supply everything else. It needs pilots trained to fly in contested spectrum, and Merkl's lesson from Saber Junction was that soldiers must learn to navigate the spectrum the way they navigate terrain. It needs one target list across aircraft from several vendors. It needs to know which drones and batteries are ready for the next wave. It has to account for what was expended, which this spring still meant a property-loss investigation for a lost drone while the Army sorted out how to classify them. And it needs a record of each sortie for the debrief.
Each of those is a software problem dressed as a training or logistics problem.
Training on the same system you fight with
EdgeLance registers every asset, from any vendor, on one roster with its state, payload, and endurance, and the tasking layer assigns work across all of them. The same mission record that tracks a live operation records a training lane: every task, every sortie, every result. The review replays it for the debrief, and the Coach scores the radio traffic against doctrine so instructors spend their time on the soldiers who need it.
Training and operations share one system, so a squad that trained on it fights on it with nothing new to learn. The unit's readiness view shows which pilots have flown which missions, which aircraft are ready, and where the gaps are, and expended aircraft are recorded as consumed, with the task they were consumed on. The training mission page shows how a lane runs end to end.
Count the pilots
The Army's experimental drone battalion is closing after Saber Junction, and the service has chosen to spread the lessons across every unit instead of building dedicated drone formations. That puts the training burden on every squad leader in the force. The measure of Drone Dominance by next year will be qualified crews per squad and sorties per crew, and units need software that counts both.