Marines Training to Field Small Drones in Combat Units by Year’s End

The Marine Corps is ramping up new training courses with plans to field 10,000 small drones and equip its ground combat teams with the unmanned aircraft systems by the end of the year.

The service wants to put drones in the hands of every infantry battalion, reconnaissance unit and littoral combat team by late 2026 in an initial drive to expand its small UAS inventory across its operational forces. To prepare to field the drones, the Marine Corps is working to build a cadre of instructors, operators and specialists through new courses to establish the requisite doctrine, tactics, instruction and training required to get the capability quickly to frontline operational forces.

“As the systems are being fielded, the demand for the operators to be trained to employ the equipment will increase,” said Col. Scott Cuomo, commander of Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico, Va.

An information request to industry last month sought options for low-cost, commercially-available small UAS that have first-person view (FPV) capabilities and can integrate into existing capabilities to operate, equip and maintain the systems. Costing approximately $2,000 to $3,000 apiece, these small, kinetic or non-kinetic drones could carry various payloads, such as cameras, jammers, communications relays or lethal munitions, with the latter turning them into attack drones.

While the Marine Corps has used drones for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, armed drones are a top – and cheap – threat on today’s high-tech battlefield, as seen in the Ukraine-Russia war. The Marine Corps, and by extension the Department of Defense, wants small drones that Marines can use to drop munitions on enemy forces, strike enemy drones or even kill a target in an attritable attack.

In a Dec. 31 service-wide message, the Marine Corps announced six provisional pilot courses:

• Basic Drone Operator,
• Attack Drone Operator,
• Attack Drone Leader,
• Payload Specialist,
• Attack Drone Instructor and
• Payload Specialist Instructor.

All are open to any military occupational specialty that meets that course prerequisites.

The Basic Drone Operator course runs 10 training days, the equivalent to 80 hours. A Marine who’s a certified basic drone operator can attend the Attack Drone course, which is 15 training days, or 120 hours. The Payload Specialist course runs five days, or 40 hours, and teaches basic skills for handling and preparing explosives to arm lethal drones in the field, according to the service. The Attack Drone Leader course will be a two-day class open to sergeants and above.

The first drone class was held in November. Training officials, Cuomo said, expect to create more operators and specialists in the coming months, with courses being offered at Camp Pendleton, Calif.; Camp Lejeune, N.C.; Marine Corps Base Hawaii; Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif.; and Marine Corps Base Okinawa, Japan.

The pilot courses will be run by 1st Marine Division schools and School of Infantry-West at Camp Pendleton; 2nd Marine Division Unmanned Systems of Excellence, School of Infantry-East and and Marine Forces Special Operations Command at Camp Lejeune; III Marine Expeditionary Force’s Expeditionary Operations Training Group in Okinawa; and Tactical Training and Exercise Control Group in Twentynine Palms.

Marines who have existing certifications to operate drones may ask to be grandfathered in under the new program, officials said. The request must be sent to the Training and Education Command.

As of Jan. 7, the Marine Corps had certified 32 attack drone operators, five attack drone instructors, 18 payload specialists and two payload specialist instructors, Cuomo said. Those numbers could grow to 72 attack drone operators and 58 payload specialists by the time ongoing courses at Camp Pendleton wrap up next week, according to Cuomo.

“By May, we will have hundreds,” Cuomo said.

Planned courses in Okinawa will boost those numbers. When the 31st MEU deploys for their 2027 spring patrol, “they will have this capability,” he added.

Officials said the key is standardizing the FPV drone training across the service so instruction at one base will be the same as other installations. The Training and Education Command leaned heavily on experience across the operational force in November during the Drone Training Symposium at Quantico.

“We brought all of those groups together… all into one room and we created a standardized training framework that everyone throughout the Marine Corps is going to focus on,” said Maj. PJ Burns, head of the education command’s capabilities branch.

No longer would Marines at one base train differently on the drones compared to another installation, Burns said.

“We wanted to standardize everything across the entire board,” Burns added

At the same time, courses will reflect the dynamic nature of drones, capabilities and use.

“We know that all these things are going to continuously change. So over the course of the next really six months to a year – and really even into the future – these courses are going to continuously change with the evolution of technology, with the evolution of different systems that come out,” Burns said. “We understand that this is going to be an ever-changing type of battlefield.”

In November in Puerto Rico, Marines with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit were the first to train and certify under the service’s FPV standards to use the Neros Archer attack drones, Cuomo said. The 22nd MEU currently is deployed in the Caribbean in support of military operations in the region.

The central hub at Quantico is the “conduit” that tracks and scales those ever-evolving sUAS capabilities, including experimenting with new technologies or capabilities, but officials also will lean on regional hubs to help develop course instructions that stay current and relevant.

“The central training hub is really going to be primarily focused on: What is the next thing? What is the next technology? How do we fix it? How do we train to it – and then working with the industry and getting all of that together,” Burns said. “As they develop and refine these courses, they would then push that down to the regional training hubs… to teach and instruct the Marines down on the ground.”

Drone simulators are also available to Marines undergoing training courses. Marines are using several sUAS training simulators through the Marine Corps’ Project Tripoli, the Marine Corps’ initiative on live, virtual and constructive training environment systems. These include DART 2.0 for initial flight training, Joint Terminal Attack Controller Virtual Trainer FPV Module for tactical training, and Flowstate for collective teams training, Infante said.

As more Marines are trained and certified, operational units will “help refine the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) as they begin using these systems,” added Maj. Hector Infante, a spokesperson for the Training and Education Command. “We will continue to refine doctrinal employment and integrate these capabilities more fully into training, ensuring they align with evolving needs.”

In December, 80 Marine second lieutenants attending the Infantry Officer Course used FPV drones in a culminating training event on Range 400 at Twentynine Palms, he said. The training was meant to familiarize the new officers on how they could employ such capability out on a range.

The Attack Drone Leader course, Burns said, was a “crash course” for small-unit leaders and will serve as a baseline of understanding.

“[It was] to expand their thinking – understand the capabilities [and] the limitations of some of these types of systems,” Burns said. “What do I need to think about? Do I need to think about spectrum? I need to think about different types of enemy jamming capabilities, right?”

Also guiding the Marine leaders is the Attack Drone Employment Pamphlet, which “gives them a starting point and an ability to kind of adapt off of those things,” Burns said.

“We really tried to lay down the doctrine through that pamphlet and then give them a leader course to understand the capabilities and limitations for them to think and expand beyond their current way of going forward,” Burns said.