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“To me, the biggest way that we're doing this is introducing technology into the [U.S. Army] formations that is not fully baked. And so all of us who were in the Army in the 90s, the 2000s, even the 2010s, you were issued a piece of equipment and that was it -- maybe a TM (technical manual) and you didn't have any say in how it was made or how it should be altered. And today in a number of different [Army] organizations, we're putting the tech in an immature state in front of the soldiers -- and industry is with them -- to be able to iterate and make things so much better, so much faster. So that to me is compelling to them and they can give very real feedback and everybody that's dealt with soldiers knows they're not going to pull any punches, right?”
That was Under Secretary of the Army Michael Obadal speaking July 30, on The Future of U.S. Land Power at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) along with former-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who held that job during the first Trump administration.
Together, the two provided insightful looks at how the Army is dealing with the introduction of new technology.
Obadal, for example, described a personal experience from a day or two earlier when he got into an autonomous vehicle with a staff sergeant. “We're getting ready to like he's showing me all this stuff, and I said, ‘This is incredible. What do you think?’ And he said, "Yeah, I don't like it.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’"
Obadal then recalled he and the sergeant had a 15minute conversation and he learned when the sergeant told him “I think this is really cool tech, but it's the integration of that tech” that bothered him. For Obadal that was something “that you don't get in a lab, you get it only by putting those things in the hands of soldiers.”
“We're introducing them [new Army enlistees] at the very onset of their Army career to technologies being pushed down in[to military] units.” Obadal said, adding, “There is additional skill-type, identifier-training that they can go to. We have a software factory in Austin, Texas [Army Software Factory of the U.S. Army Transformation and Training Command] that's incredibly capable. It's a two-year program where they really are able to code and create new applications, all really software based.”
McCarthy recalled, “If you go back to 2017, there was nowhere near the emphasis on pushing autonomous systems into the formations. A lot of that's cultural. If you go even back to like 2008 and the Air Force's resistance to taking on more Predator [an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft] caps in the Middle East, my former boss, [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates, making it a priority with the department. So, culture is a big part of it. The good thing is it's 10 years later, we have younger people, much more technologically savvy than I ever was.”
As with most people, Obadal starts his discussion of change with Ukraine, which he described as an “incredible battle lab,” about which he said, “not just the Army, the entire [Defense] Department has gone to great lengths to understand what are the lessons that are coming out of there, because no one is iterating technology faster than the Ukrainians.”
He then described the initial Russian-Ukraine fighting as “positional warfare, because neither side possessed an actual maneuver, combined-arms, army.” Instead, Obadal said, “two uncoordinated armies really came together, got into positional warfare, and then we saw the innovation of the drones and a number of other things, but specific is the drones.”
Currently in the Russian-Ukraine war, Obadal said, “You have a dead zone of several kilometers between these two positions and it's very reminiscent of World War I,” where artillery was introduced, and “now the drone…is an enabler of soldiers. So how do you deny terrain with drones? How do you actually take terrain with drones?”
“We've taken all of those lessons and incorporated [them] in,” Obadal said, “so now at this point in basic training our soldiers are actually operating drones. Not something that was happening two or five years ago. But they get that familiarization as soon as they are coming into the Army in our training centers.”
At the Army National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, Obadal said he watched U.S. operational forces conducting exercises “utilizing a number of different drones to have certain effects – electronic warfare, observation, calling-for-fire, and first-person, viewer-kinetic action. That's the ‘operationalization’ of it [drone warfare].”
But Obadal was most interesting to me when he expanded on how the Army had “spent billions on buying commercial off-the-shelf drones that are customized for military use,” and shipped them to “almost every [Army] division and even down in regiments.” There, he continued, “We have small groups of soldiers that have been pulled in by the leadership, given some budget, small budget, and given a facility and said, ‘Put together drones that we can go out on our training areas and utilize.’”
The result of this localized drone creation was, Obadal said, “They [the drones] are not exquisite. They cost very little to make. It's okay to crash them. But what it's doing is not just the technology, the other thing we're learning, [as] from the Ukraine, is you have an incredibly capable core [of Army personnel] that knows how to utilize drones in every aspect of it.”
Another purpose, Obadal explained, “It's not about flying an FPV [first-person view/controlled] drone that's part of it, it's about how do you team them together; how do you do all of the things that we're watching the Ukrainians do; so we we're baking that in into our organizations by letting them…mass-produce as many low-cost drones as they can so that they can get the repetitions…We have to go through hundreds of repetitions a day in our Army to build that repository of knowledge, turn that into doctrine, which is constantly evolving, and then spread it throughout our Army.”
Commenting on the Army drone system, McCarthy said, “They're allowing leaders at every level to be entrepreneurial in nature, to look at the capability, to learn the technology, and make recommendations to the changes in task organization. They're going to have to change the
business model of the Army. There might not be 40 people in a rifle platoon five or 10 years from now. There might be half as many. So we have the luxury where we can be a little deliberate. We may want to go faster. The world's complicated, but doing it the right way, the smart way, they're going to make better choices.”
For example, at a February 2026 exercise at Fort Stewart, Georgia, soldiers experimented with electronic warfare payloads on medium-range reconnaissance systems and tested various configurations on FPV drones to determine system limitations and capabilities, according to an
Army press release. “The ongoing innovation includes stressing equipment through rigorous training to understand what works best for operational units,” the release said.
The Army, Obadal said, is “trying to encourage small [drone making] companies, new entrants that have compelling technology. We're trying to leverage as much external capital, because there is a large amount of external capital that's invested in the defense technology industry, but we just haven't rewarded it at the right level.”
Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisitions, Logistics and Technology Brent Ingraham is changing acquisition processes that are intended to foster rapid prototyping, rapid fielding and rapid acquisition of new capabilities, Obadal said.
He continued, “What it's about is continuing to prototype and experiment at scale and then feed all of that into our Combined Arms Center (CAC).” There, he said, Lt. Gen. James P. Isenhower III, CAC Commanding General will determine “now how do we put our findings back into areas that will change force management or capability requirements.”
Summing up, Obadal said, “Today we have young men and women that I see out in the organizations with highly technical capabilities that allow them to do direction-finding, to do pinpoint locations of enemy emissions, and then utilizing other capabilities to visually confirm feeding all of that back into a data-centric C2 [communications] system. So it's that human machine teaming of giving the right capabilities to our soldiers allows them to be far more effective than they were just a couple years ago.”
Obadal added, “It's an important thing to remember right now we're not replacing soldiers with autonomous or unmanned weapons. What we're doing is we are unburdening the soldier from the mundane tasks or the most dangerous tasks so that they can take a step back and they can do the things that only humans -- whether it's soldiers, commanders -- can do.”
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