- US soldrers in Lithuania trained to identify drones by the sound of their buzz overhead.
- The Army exercise also tested combat movement under constant drone presence.
- Troops practiced fighting in skies crowded with drones, jammers, and other sensors.
During a recent US Army counter-drone exercise along NATO's eastern edge, American soldiers worked on developing a new skill: listening for the distinct buzz of drones overhead.
The Project Flytrap exercise in Lithuania saw a company of US soldiers training with drones, counter-drone systems, and electronic jamming tools in a force-on-force event against their British counterparts.
One of the goals of the exercise was to replicate the tactical messiness of modern drone warfare outside the sterile training environments the military often inadvertently creates for itself, soldiers from the Army's 2nd Cavalry Regiment said during a Thursday media roundtable with reporters.
Sgt. 1st Class Tyler Harrington, a 2nd Cavalry platoon sergeant whose team worked on counter-drone tactics during the exercise, said that the presence of adversarial drones forced soldiers to change up their thinking and tactics, shifting how they move and what they pay attention to.
"All of a sudden, you hear buzzing," Harrington said. "No longer am I just scanning to my 12 o'clock and around me at a ground level."
The lesson was not just that drones are a prolific threat on the modern battlefield, but that soldiers need to treat the sky above them as a potential source of danger and be attuned to those threats.
The 2nd Cavalry Regiment, an Army Stryker brigade based in Europe, is a hotbed for Army experimentation and modernization efforts. The unit, for instance, recently tested new communications methods and uncrewed ground vehicles for possible casualty evacuations.
During the recent exercise, Harrington's small group began learning how to identify different drones based only on their sound. That is not a service-wide tactic, but rather a skill that his unit is exploring.
One-way attack drones, from quadcopters to octocopters to loitering munitions, sound different than other battlefield munitions. Moving swiftly across the battlespace, the often propeller-driven weapons buzz and whiz in ways that other systems do not. Harrington said listening to those drone signatures has kick-started newly developed team response drills.
The Pentagon has been aggressively pushing drones and counter-drone tools while still working through the necessary policies and practices for training troops effectively and realistically. Drones and electronic warfare training can be limited by airspace regulations, electromagnetic spectrum restrictions, safety concerns, and the practical difficulty of recreating a battlefield crowded with friendly and enemy drones.
For soldiers with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, the challenge was not simply destroying enemy drones but learning how to maneuver in a battlespace filled with both friendly and hostile uncrewed aircraft, jammers, and sensors. It can be difficult in the chaos of battle to distinguish one drone from another, and electronic warfare can jam a friendly drone as easily as an adversarial one.
The exercise also tested how drone systems hold up under factors like human exhaustion and weather conditions.
"How do these things work through a long-duration battle period against a living, breathing, thinking enemy?" Lt. Col. Jason Kruk, commander of the regiment's 2nd Squadron, said during the roundtable. "How do they work after 8, 12, 36 hours straight?"
That stress was complicated by local weather that could quickly turn from sunshine to snow or sleet, conditions that can make drone operations more challenging.
Army officials declined to specify which drone or counter-drone systems soldiers used during the training.
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