How a Team of Marines Built the Corps FPV Drone Training Program

[Music] You are listening to The War on the Rocks Podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs. My name is Ryan Evans and I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In October of last year, the Marine Corps had virtually no first-person view attack drones. That's changed, and it's changed quickly. This episode is about how that happened. More specifically, it's about how a team of Marines at weapons training battalion Aquanico went from a cold start to building a Marine Corps-wide FPV drone training system. Their job is not just to train Marines out of fly drones, it's to create standards, certification, safety protocols, TTPs, and a repeatable training model that can scale across the entire service. Weapons training battalion under the command of Colonel Scott Cuomo has been the central hub where all this happens and where the trainers from the Marine Corps 7 Regional Training Hubs are themselves trained. In this episode, I talk with the team behind that effort from enlisted to officer. We discuss how they learn from Ukraine, how they build a training pipeline from almost nothing, how they made choices on which drones to use, and energetics, a fancy word for things that explode, and so much more. Yes, this is a conversation about FPV drones, but it's also a conversation about the things many of us admire about the Marine Corps, how they move so quickly from recognition to experimentation to standards to scale. But first, this episode is brought to you by One Brief, which is transforming the future of the military staff. Works seamlessly across teams and tech stacks on plans. Go from hours to minutes in One Brief. In the middle of this episode, I have a short chat with Grant Demory about the future of One Brief, he's the founder and CEO, and its acquisition of the Wargaming and Simulations Company Battle Road. Learn more about One Brief at warntherocks.com/OneBreathe that's O-N-E-B-R-I-E-F. Warntherocks.com/OneBreathe. Two housekeeping notes, one. On Quantico, there was some electromagnetic interference, so you're going to hear a little bit of static and noise at some small parts of the episode, and I apologize for that. And two, the opinions you're about to hear from these Marines are their own. They do not represent those of the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government, but in my opinion, their opinions are pretty good opinions. Enjoy the show. Last time we spoke, we were really focused mostly on marksmanship and small arms training. Here we're talking about First Person Drones. Explain to me how your battalion made that evolution over the course of the last couple years. First Ryan, thank you, and we'll call thank you for being here with the team. So I think it's good to start with marksmanship because it's kind of where our task came from. So for the listeners, we're in the what we know of here as the Down Range Club, and it's really the home of Marine Corps marksmanship going back 125 years now. The Marine Corps, the turn of the 20th century, was not anywhere near as proficient and small arms marksmanship as we are now. So our ninth comment on it created the shooting team and the first captain of the team, the annual best shooter in the Marine Corps gets an award and it's called the Lockheimer Trophy, and this has been going on for well over a century. So if you rewind back to December of 2024, we had spoken a couple of months earlier on that podcast. That month in December of 2024, Ukraine employed somewhere around 54,000 first person view attack drones and we're at a holiday party, sparing all the details and Lieutenant General Watson's holiday party. Major General Henderson, both of them had sat in this room a month earlier and kind of just like walk through this history. They essentially said, hey, we were not as good as we are today with shooting a long time ago, the ninth comment on creative shooting team. They figured out the best weapons, best training went around the court taught everybody, got a bellow wood like history light from there destroying your adversary at 600 yards. What do you think about creating a drone team to do the same thing? And we went back and forth them what we call it and we landed on attack drone because we needed. So that started at that holiday party in the official tasking. I hold this with me often. I know you know CJ Chris Chivers on three January 2025 Chris published this article in New York Times and the title was House Suicide Drone, transformed the front lines in Ukraine. And Major General Henderson was flipping through the article and he stopped on this inset. And you can see what is happening to the adversaries in this picture here. And it's a view of a first person view camera closing in on Russian service members about to blow them up. And General Henderson for listeners who know him, he looks like inside linebacker. He's a rather he pounded the table and he said this is unacceptable that we can't do this. And we're going to figure this out. And I'm not interested in long up orders and long campaign plans. Get after it. And so that's essentially what this group has done around the clock. And if I just kind of build on and make one more and then turn it over General Henderson gave that guidance General Durand shortly thereafter from the war fighting lab. We partnered there and then our common art and saw major the Marine Corps just amplified it. And we've been off to the racist sense. And how did you guys move out on that you have this amazing team of Marines here. How have you guys been executing on that? And then you're left you have Sergeant Brock up who at the time was a Lance Corporal for the Marines to listen in here get senior leader intent you figure out and we're focused on lethality. Literally how do you make a Marine as lethal as possible? The answer enemies in Lance Corporal Brock was one of the first volunteers. He helped create a sim. He's one of our lead attack drone instructors. So we have Marines across the battalion. So chief on our superior saw sitting here is the officer in charge of our methods of entry school. Two jobs at the same time we weren't like it wasn't like here you go here's a bunch of Marines to figure this out. It was we need to figure this out and you had a whole bunch of Marines volunteer to do multiple jobs at the same time. So we can go in more and more on that but that's probably how it started I met Brock up he was standing right there in the first meeting here. He said I want in and how that happens. So our major sent the note out and said hey we're looking for volunteers and there he was. Let's start with you Sergeant. How did you become aware of this opportunity and what did you get started on as soon as you joined the team? So an RFI was put out if anyone had drone experience at the time I was a range coach. My job was to teach and train students over at TBS. The lieutenants there on basic rifle marksmanship as well as pistol marksmanship. There was question out there that was asked is anyone interested in doing drone work room was silent. Everyone was just done finishing a range everyone was tired. I was the only one that raised their hand been from there. I was taking to the team. How'd you had any drone experience before? I was taught early on back in my old unit for reference 0 3 11 infantry rifleman. I was taught on how to use one of our ISR platforms and so I'd carry that around with me being able to look around in the local area. Do reconnaissance aerial reconnaissance look for enemies and this was a little drone correct. So I carry that with me and my job was to make sure that our lines of movement was safe and secure in order for us to accomplish the mission. That's about as much drone experience I had nothing compared to where we are today with FPV drones. So the cycle of learning must have been pretty incredible. We had you on the show last time but you were already on the team. But how did you get pulled in on the drone stuff? So it's about my time to rotate off the Marine Corps shooting team as I was getting ready to go back to the fleet. I was honestly kind of embarrassed. I didn't really know much about drones. I had heard about the drone team and I talked some of the teammates about kind of what it was and where they thought it was going to go. And then Colonel Cuomo asked if I would stand here and contribute to the team. I couldn't turn that down. The work at first was frankly just overwhelming. There was a space that was totally new to me. But what was not new was the work ethic of the Marines and the commanders that were part of the team to help build it. It was much like the competition arms program. Kind of rework a couple years ago that I was fortunate enough to be a part of. It was a problem we need to train this as fast as we can and as efficiently as we can across the fleet. And just basically took the word shooting and put FPV in there and started from there. So I joined the team less than a year ago. Colonel Cuomo said that they needed a 1371 on the team coming to the near. I was working at the Method Venture School and I achieved when I was a part of Pearson. I said, hey, we move you on over to the team and I was excited to be a part of this team because in all my time in the Marine Corps, I've never seen a piece of gear move so quick. And to be able to be a part of a team that is helping the multitude of Marines, I was just excited to be able to be a part of that team and to be able to be able to put my fingerprint on that. So that's how I joined the team. Troy, who telling the Italian Gunner here background, you know, 21 year infantrymen with that is the infantry weapons officer, not a normal weapon for the infantry one that we've had for years like a mortar machine gun. But something that all infantrymen are going to have now is another asset for combined arms. So I've been with the battalion about nine months now and service the battalion gunner slash Marine Corps Tactrone team gunner to help operation, you know, use it in the FMF as well as as we scale this ensure it's done safe, but more importantly, you know, the sound TTPs can be applied to the employment across all formations. Chief one of Steven Pierce all I am the OIC for the methods of entry school, you would also buy trade in my 26th year at this point. My story began with kind of on part with Colonel Columbus. He came to me and asked me to figure out how to arm an FPV drone and that started off with I wasn't going to do what they're doing in Ukraine for most intensive purposes what they're doing in Ukraine is building fine IDs. And that's not what we're going to do. I knew we could make an intrinsically safe system that's safe for Marines to employ and something that logistically can move as fast as what General Henderson wanted us to move. I don't want to degrade what the Ukrainians are going through or why they're doing what they're doing, they're doing what they're doing because of the type of fight that they're in. And if we were in that same fight, I would be there doing the exact same thing they're doing. But we're not in that type of fight. So we can approach this from a different level and make this thing intrinsically safe to reduce those risks that the Ukrainians have to accept just because of the world and the type of fight that they're in right now. General Henderson always used to tell us something when he would leave us, he would come out to the range and my staff and so I see was heavily involved in this well. But he always told us at the end of the day, he's like, your only limitation is safety. And that was kind of the big driving force on a lot of this that he didn't care about policy or directives or orders. He just said, get it done. Your only limitation safety. So after a lot of searching, we found the Neuros Archer. The Neuros was the only blue listed drone at the time, FPV drone. And we found through contacts about Kraken kinetics. We got a whole system, did some internal testing on our own, talked to the manufacturers about how operated and how it worked. And then I went to Colonel Colombo and we showed him the system and said, sir, this is what General Henderson wants. I think this is how we're going to do it. He agreed. We briefed both General Henderson and General Durand on the systems. Ultimately they accepted the risk and then we started building the procedures. The system was going to be high risk due to its nature and how it's built. So we started developing procedures associated to reduce those risks. Basically, so it doesn't blow up in the Marines hands is what you're saying. No, it's probably one of the risks. Maybe there's other. It is, but not in the way you think about it. Risks are associated with different levels. Like what is the riskiest part of this action that a Marine takes? Okay, well, how can we mitigate that risk? And then we built that into you can you can mitigate risk through engineering such as a bunker device or you can mitigate risk through steps and procedures and TTPs. And so over the last 17 months, we built steps and procedures in 4.1 if the drone pamphlet. Yeah, and I'm looking at this very detailed pamphlet that walks through billet actions, billet action and communication requirements. Right. And so very thorough. And it was a fluid through as we we wrote original procedures and then as we started actually applying these procedures, we said, Hey, we need to add this. We should change this and it was kind of a fluid thing until we eventually started getting this to a point where, Hey, I think we can we can do this and let's we got to get it through all these other things. Do you think safety, this restriction of safety, which is an important one that I obviously agree with also resulted in a more lethal effective platform like this wasn't just about keeping people safe, but it was about something that would be more effective in combat. Absolutely. Yeah. Because if you're losing Marines from your weapons system, you're going to be less lethal. Building on what all the teammates and phenomenal Marines here have laid out kind of the Marine Corps calling card on 911. What we bring is a combined arms formation that can seize terrain. This has not taken anything away from what's happened in the incredible courage of Ukrainian soldiers, for example, you often hear about that battle or that war. You'll hear about a 20 or 40 kilometer no man's land. We're not allowed to have a no man's land. We have to be able to move across that ground. And again, that's not taking anything away from them. It is hard. It is exceptionally hard. It's arguably the hardest thing for a military formation to do when an enemy is holding a piece of ground to seize that piece of ground. If we think about this and the question of safety, the way in which for well over a century since we incorporated machine guns, the way you close that ground is you maneuver into what we call MSDs or minimum safe distances. So what that would mean if the wall is the terrain objective you're going after, you would employ machine guns against that wall or you would employ mortars for as long as you possibly could and you would maneuver into the minimum safe distance. And what that's saying is if you're shooting mortars at that objective, there'd be an explosion on that objective and then you would, there'd be a science like if that explosion is center mass on that objective, the frag pattern is going to go here. So you have to jump in a covered position here or you're going to start hurting your own people. As that relates to drones, there's a component of safety of like physically, how are you packing the payload, etc. But there's a whole nother part of this that we have learned across this journey where ISR drones like Sarmbrachup spoke about are critically important. The moment you put explosives on a drone, just like the moment you put explosives on a mortar, just like the moment, then there is a minimum safe distance and if you're going to move across that nomans land, you must understand the science behind it. And Steve in these procedures, they are a step by step so that you understand Gunner does this normally when we give demonstrations, just like shooting a rifle. There are certain condition codes you'd see on the bottom of the electronic safe and arming device. There's different kind of few settings if you will. If you put it on here, it's going to blow up four meters away from the target. If you put it here, it's two meters away from the target. Here, it's commanded from a safety perspective. This matters. The payload goes here. So if I'm trying to close on this target and I'm trying to get as close as humanly possible because that's the threat, then you're going to change this setting so that the frag pattern is further away from you. So it's not like safety for safety sake. This is safety because we get paid to do fire and maneuver to seize a piece of ground. You must understand all the science behind the weapon and we've done this for over a century. And that's for all the listeners and in choice on humble, he won't say this. We have 102 Gunners in the Marine Corps. So Infantry weapons officers is a unique military occupational special. How do commanders make sure that we are excellent at combined arms? We have a specific military. So every infantry battalion, the Toral Combat Team Infantry Regiment Division have Gunners. And it's no like surprise that he's sitting at the table. It is his job to make sure that all the young infantry Marines across the Corps and all his peers understand this and teach it to him. Just your point, Ryan, and to kind of riff off what Colonel Cuomo was saying, a lot of the guys saying safety is paramount or safety is first. That's a hangover from probably a limited site picture they've had since they were in tactically sound tactics techniques and procedures TTPs are always going to be inherently safe because we build those with the end in mind of fires in support of maneuver at close proximity executing combined arms, which unlike what we're seeing in Eastern Ukraine or sometimes our sister services isn't at the forefront of what they're doing. So it's not safety comes before tactically sound training. It's we build tactically sound TTPs. And if those are executed, the training itself will remain inherently safe. So how long did it take you get these marching orders from the general, you immediately start looking for the drone, you settle on the Nero, how long did that take? It's probably not probably a simple question with not so simple answer. I'm guessing. Now the short answer is about four months. So this picture you're seeing here, Ryan, you've interacted with the Marine Corps for a long time. The common on tells you to do something you do it. So this picture is taken five May. So the common on came out. So we got the official marching order on if you want to say the official was on three January, you want to go to the holiday party. It was a couple of weeks earlier. So three January were told to do it. We don't have drones. We don't have Marines. You got great Marines like then Lance Corporal Brock up volunteer, couple of the Marines volunteer. The Neurosarter goes on DI use blue list on Valentine's Day and it's like a surreal. It's like where a bunch of proud Marines here. But this is like Semper Fidelis like seem to this whole thing on seven. So then Lance Corporal Brock up a Marine gunry star, not slur and lieutenant Ganon are our first three pilots. They go to school to learn how to fly this off base late February. And I speak to them on Monday in the second week of the course. And I asked a gunny who's a career infringement like some of these guys. I said, is this thing good to go? And he says, sir, and I said, his arm, would you take it or? Yes, sir. And I turned to his defense. Yo, I see. And I said, when you guys come back on Thursday, so we're flying this on the range literally right next to us on for those listening familiar on the thousand yard kind of what we know as a sniper range. And at the time, all the regulations weren't you asked previously, like, what the regulations weren't there? Fast forward to two Fridays later, major general Woodworth, who is in charge of all Marine Corps installations, is coming down to shoot with the shooting team. And he and his team made 30 minutes in a schedule to learn about all these drones. And so Brock up zips a drone down range forward with no payload. And we're like happy like that morning. I'm like, you know, kind of standard what's on the bingo card type of thing. Are we going to be able to fly this drone is the general going to be happy type of thing. So we fly and there's about 300 folks for those listening from Quantico range control and Marine Corps installations command as a all in the range. It's literally like seven hundred yards that way. And general Woodworth says at the end is like, you mind if I talked to everybody real quick? Okay, you're a two star. They're like, all right, I appreciate you asking general, but obviously you don't talk to the Marines. He says, I'm an F 18 pilot. We've been treating these as if they're all F 18s. We're done doing that. We need to figure out how to get these in young Marines hands. If you're putting in a raise your hand, if you're a part of range control and you know, whatever, like 20 people raise their hand. I gave guidance in a meeting this week. Take your orders out, take your pen out. And if there's something standing away, young Marines training with these capabilities, change it now. Like back to the bingo card like man, am I have, but this is where like, like, whoa, he turned and looked. So Steve, myself, there was a group of us that was standing there, brought up like 20 yards away from him. And he looked at us and he said, what I just watched on this base next month, armed. And you could hear a pin drop. And how the heck are we going to do that? And that's when we started having our core senior exploits. of experts to back to how do you do this in the way that Troy was speaking about in a tactically sound manner and two more and I'll turn it over. As this energy came, this is like top-down leadership. This is a picture of, I mean you know this because you've interacted with them. Starmaj of the Marine Corps has many jobs. Taken care of all Marines, officers and that's his foremost job. He came down on the 28th April and he spent time and this is Brock up. Right there's Brock up flying. This is Starmaj of the Marine Corps right behind and back to safety. These are the two payload specialists going to set the drone because at the time you're setting it 123 meters away from the ground control station because that is tactically sound because that is the minimum safe distance. If it goes off, you're not going to hear if you're outside that 123 meters. The point being, Starmaj got done. He videotaped this, put it as this on his Instagram and it like went viral and you could tell the Marines wanted this and Starmaj wrote you know a nice thing about it and then a week later the common on came and you see this in the picture. This is the explosion that the common on saw and when he's done you can read it underlined my goal get it into the hands of Marines fast. So this is all within four months and back to the safety discussion. It's like a squad enemy in the picture for the listeners and when that detonates 1,272 three millimeter tungsten cubic, the general is described it as a flying clean more. So if you want to close on a target and a 12,172 three millimeter tungsten cubes you're going to want to know where are they going so you can figure out where everybody should maneuver. So the short answer is about four months. The common on comes down gives us the marching orders and then as any good Marines the common on cave in marching orders and we've been at a dead sprint since. We're going to take a quick break from this conversation with these amazing Marines to talk to Grant Demory, the founder of One Brief, the command operating system. You heard a bit about One Brief in the intro to this episode but Grant's going to tell you more about how the acquisition of a company called Battle Road is completely revolutionizing how the US military is going to plan and execute on different courses of action in high stakes operations. We're so excited about these guys. Planning and wargaming modeling simulation they go together and together that's what gives you superhuman course of action. Battle Road is the best military simulation in the world. It's a planet scale, physics-based sim simulating all the way down to every munition, every radar cross section and all the way up to theater level logistics. We're tracking it every time step where everything is in 3D on the terrain. We've put together recently is an AI product that covers the whole loop of the joint planning process and the ultimate purpose is to give you course of action faster and smarter than any human would think of. In one click you generate the wargaming and then inside of the simulation product you play out what would have happened in your course of action, get an after-action review, the AI uses the after-action review to make the course of action better and you keep doing that. Ultimately getting the orders, the sync matrix, the graphics, everything you need to execute a course of action better than human staff could. We stop at every step and at every step there's a chance to evaluate, is this reasonable? Do I agree with this? Do I want to change something? And what that means is this is the future of teaming human staffs with AI to get something better than any one of them could have done it around. If you want to learn more about One Brief and the exciting things they're doing with Battle Road, go to warntheirox.com/OneBreath. That's O-N-E-B-R-I-E-F back to the conversation. So question for you guys, YouTube trained many, many Marines with SMARMS. What are some of the early lessons that you learned on all right training Marines on these are different from small arms and these this is how? So I'm sure there was ideas, experimentation, what if we try this? You had to develop this with your teammates with your fellow Marines. What were some of the early ideas that maybe didn't survive contact? How'd you think about it in those early days? I initially thought about it just like any other weapon system. Generally speaking, in my internship, we'll describe if it's got a sight in the trigger, there are certain ways to hold it maybe, but it's all kind of fundamentally the same. So when I first approached this, I came in October of last year. So the team had already had a significant amount of momentum. So when I first approached this, I just watched them kind of do their thing and it was more or less traditional for what Marines do. Hey everyone, this is what this is, hear what these buttons are. Okay, let's put your hands in fly. One thing that I saw that was phenomenal, the team did a really good job of building the confidence in those young Marines, which then in turn built the confidence in their leaders because there's no fault of them, but this was a totally new type of thing to put in Marines hands. So there was no roadblock per se. It was more so. Oh, that's what it looks like. Oh, that's what it does. So when the Marines, the younger Marines specifically got it, they quickly built past that learning curve and just were employing it like any other type of weapon, which was from my experience as a 12 year-perch made it was pretty cool. They were able to pick it up much faster than I initially thought they would. This isn't any different just because it's a drone. It's just another weapon system. We still go through Qual, Walk, Run, whether it's a rifle or a drone, you crawl, you learn the fundamentals before you even think about flying live. We have simulators that every student has to have a certain amount of hours on until we say that they are proficient and that we see they're competent enough to do live flights. Whether it's just doing dry firing with their rifle on the range, slow-setting trigger pull all the way straight to the back or fine motor movements and key movements needed to get that drone off the ground. It's all the same. Now the only thing I would say is different is the augmented use of simulators. So unlike just having a drone and you can't just do live flights from it, you can, but probably won't end up with good results. We use simulators as a way to get that fine motor skills and that flight skills needed for every student to understand the concepts of how FPV drones fly and how they are to be used and implemented. One thing I really appreciate it with the simulators was it was something that the Marines could just take home. Teaching a variety of different shooting courses there be times before and after the training where we'd sit there and dry fire on the range because we have the weapons so we had to have supervision on them and then the Marines would turn them in and go about their day. However, what we see now is it's just a laptop and a controller. So they'll have structured time with the team here. But what we've seen is the best flyers through the training we've done have been the guys and gals that have done the simulation time themselves on the weekends or after hours before hours type thing. So the Marines were really able to kind of just thrive. The simulators are something I wish I had from the beginning is what I'll say. How many of these things do you need real-world drones to maintain your training pipeline? Because these things you're blowing some of them up they run into things they get damaged they get destroyed. How does that work? From the ground up building this to build on some blockups crawl walk run. When we train generally speaking you will do something you'll issue an operations order for example you'll build a terrain model or whatever it is sometimes you'll do it on a dry race board depending on the setting. So the Marines know the overall plan and then you'll rehearse it and you'll have your weapons but you might say bang bang or you might shoot with blank you know weapons or whatever the case might be and then you kind of add and you go live and then you may do certain parts if it's a complicated scheme and over you might practice certain subsets before you put it together. So as it relates to this question the crawl is you can equate to some degree to the work on simulation. So one for the listeners where we're looking at what we call joint virtual training hyphen first-person view which is built on JVT for which some listeners may be familiar with joint terminal attack controllers and joint forward observers. We worked closely with the office and naval research and with General Watson's T-Com with their live virtual constructive to build a simulator. So the crawl is Marines will spend anywhere from a minimum of 20 to upwards of 30 and some to gunny stewards point they'll just get on the simulator and so they'll develop a proficiency. Then the run you'll fly the drone with a training payload and so it's Steve just handed and this is like you fly it's the same weight you can get a sense so from the way that you know phenomenal Marines like Storm Brock up working to build the sim when you're flying the sim it's aerodynamically the same thing. So when you put this on here it's the same pay when you put the training payload on it weighs the same as the antipersonnel payload. So you're walking now and all the dynamics are the same you'll see later when you put the FPV goggles on they count down they design the system so it's just a cumulative skill build before you go to the run is when you put the kinetic payload but it's the same action you have to do the same thing and so you know this just goes to this is a weapon system let's employ it like we do with any weapon system and you do that with machine guns mortars etc. Last one for me before I turn it over so how many with training payloads where we're we're freaking this out as we go. In some cases we've flown the training plate over the archer hundreds upon hundreds of times. One of the if you want to call it a downside I don't necessarily think of it that way but the drone itself when you add it all together is somewhere between four and five thousand dollars so to your point if you go out and you make it look like this and it blows up you don't have it anymore. The beauty of the training payload is you can keep flying this and in fact before we do this as part of this manual the Marine will do eight rehearsal flights and so those are drones you can fly down range you can bring them back fly down range and you can keep reusing them so it keeps cost in check. One of the lessons I learned was ripping on one of the things that I talked about earlier as he was kind of like an incidental operator back in the fleet with a a smaller drone for ISR I had maybe seen two or three of those at a time in like a warehouse let's say we've seen upwards of a couple 100 of these things readily available for you to train with. So that's one thing that I've had lots of conversations with my peers about of, this is a thing you can go train and train hard. And if you break a couple little things, there meant to be a tritable and we have a, we have a large enough number of them to where Marines can actually fly them, not aggressive for aggressive sake, but they would fly them in the same profile that they would, if they were executing a kinetic strike. So they're able to train exactly how they would fight to get after that kind of run phase. Yeah, and just to kind of talk through some historicals for other weapons systems. For example, the O352, the anti-armor Marine in the infantry, a javelin, a current battalion sees about one to four javelins a year tops, normally a divisions, you know, I think last year, the first Marine division, for example, is about seven javelins. So for that weapon system, there's one guy at one point in time that year, we'll get a fire that outside of service level training in that for his other weapon system being the toe, you're talking about 10 to 20 rounds, unlike the, the Nero's with we actually have a sim that's very like flying the real thing. That's accessible at every echelon of where these drones are and at high echelons are not only is there JVTE, there's also a dart that will be at the BSCs at the units, the regional hubs at every main location will have the own sim set up. And that directly translates into maintaining that proficiency, additionally, you know, but to your original question, you know, the initial fielding plan, I want to say it was roughly 70ish, you know, between strikes and hotels per unit, very high number. We don't have the data right now that shows what their breakage rate is, but we do have data that shows based on the 25 to 35 sim hours, maintaining that doing the LED trainers asset attrition is very low outside of when a unit does go kinetic, which won't be every time that we train with drones, which is fine, not every range will support it a lot do, but there's also times where you get the same exact effects out of an LED or an inert strike as you will as a kinetic, you can, you know, save some of those assets. So since you went live with this in May 25, how many Marines have gone through this training? The numbers go up like quite literally, as you'll see, we have seven, 14 Marines in training right now. And first, so Gunner Hoteling mentioned regional hubs, so maybe taking a step back. The answer as we're speaking is over 300 men just keeps going up. So the way the service mark kind of, and we've spoken about this in the past, like our magical little white book war fighting or MCDP one or FM one is centralized planning, decentralized execution. So the way the services approach this, where part of the centralized plan? So we're here in Quantico, you know, hectors from TCOM. So General Watson is responsible all training. When you go to title 10, man train equipped, he's responsible to the common out for all training. So General Watson sets this training standards. I lost count of how many times he has come and spent time with us, not surprising Gunner served with the General Watson. When he was a battalion commander in Afghanistan. So our head training general has come down. And obviously my immediate boss, Major General Brooks is the training command commanding general serving for the training and education command. So you have top down centralized. This is the way we will train Marines. Like you're not going to go, for example, you won't go to third Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa and see them training differently. This is exactly the way the video that you saw the Mew. The Marines will learn the same procedures, all the payload actions, verbatim. So they go through centralized here in the Quantico area and then regional hubs. There are seven regional hubs. And so you could just think of this as our main training bases. There are hubs there that go through. And so on a daily basis, they are training with this kind of vision and with the numbers that are laid out, we went over last six months. So if we were having this conversation in October, we had zero first person view of tact drones field in the United States Marine Corps. Today there's over 3,500. And that number is going up and the regional hubs, by and large, are doing the majority of the training we started doing most of the training. And so for example, one of the -- So a lot of it is centralized here. You've trained about 300 Marines here and then the regional hubs. And they continue doing training. They just give you an example here. So this is from Okinawa. It's shown right in a picture from December in Okinawa. So at the time, folks would say things like training with live drones itself, you know, someone would say is impossible or it's really hard. Training with a live drone in Japan, impossible. Maybe for normal people, not for Marines. So what is this picture? This is a couple of weeks before Christmas. And you ought to talk about pressure cooker. So this is the same live strike that we executed for the comment, right? So the comment on says scale this. And we know priority theater. Get this into the first island chain. Easy to say on a PowerPoint brief or something like this. Actually, it's really hard to make happen. And so this is Gunny Stewart had been on the team for about a month. Gunny Kreesman come in and I got off the plane and went to Tokyo National News. Like basically all the media organizations that you could think of are going to be on the range. And this picture here is a tenant general, Turner, the three MF commanding general, Vice Admiral Hanifan, the seventh fleet commander, and the senior Japanese ground self defense force commander is like, "Get it up. I hope it all works." And they're expecting what we call a TOT or time on target. And to all this media attention, all the senior leaders and these Marines back to the central who is responsible for going out to Okanawa to work through the range control stuff, the spectrum stuff. And over a variety of folks throughout the headquarters working it, but from central, General Watson said, "Make it happen." So this wasn't like a random group of seven or ten Marines saying, "We're going to go figure this out." All of our senior leaders knew what we were doing because this is contrary to contrary engagement with the Japanese government. Like, do we want to do this? So to the point, yes, all of this is emanated out of a central kind of headquarters Marine Corps area. Give us marching orders like Steve's saying every single time, safety's your own limiting feature. For example, the ACMAC, the ACMAC came down. Some of our generals refer to this as zero mills out. And a simple way to think of it, you will dot every eye across every T. Some might say that takes a while. What tell you, if Marines working together, this doesn't take that. We've gone from zero to 3,500 following all the procedures that we were told to follow. And if the procedures needed to change, we wrote them. And that was okay. Like, not like negligent we wrote them. It's okay. It says this. Change it to say this. We coordinate with the members, the owner of that policy and we've had so much help along the way. If you could tell us about the journey of making these explosives, something that all the Marines feel comfortable handling through their training and how you've shaped that would be great to hear about. This ties into why we went with what's called a low voltage system. So we went with a low voltage system for two reasons. One from a logistical standpoint. If we created this drone with a new type of munition, it would have had to get what's called a dotick, which it would have gone through the whole process of creating a new munition in the Marine Corps inventory. So when we originally were looking at these designs, there was a low voltage system with the crack in which we went through. And the best part about this system is it uses doticks that are already in the Marine Corps inventory. It's a DOD ID identification. So every munition, every piece of ordinance, every block of C4, stick of dynamite has a dotick number to it. It's how the Department of War categorizes all of its munitions. From a logistical standpoint, in the Marine Corps, we are confined differently than our sister services in the Army in the Air Force because we go on ships and ships have limited space and availability for storage of these type of things. So the ships already have C4 and blasting caps on them. So from a logistical standpoint, this system, I mean, I flew on a commercial airline with this system last week because there's no energetic hazards associated with it. It's completely inert. But I could go into theater, we could take these systems and fly them to Japan, and we can draw C4 and blasting caps from the ASP, the ammo supply point in Okinawa, and then we can make this system kinetic. And the simplification of that system is why we've been able to move as quick as we've been able to move with this system because we've cut out a large swathe of creating new dotick dynamite munition. And now the best thing about the Marine Corps is we have, I think, the second biggest military occupational specialty in the Marine Corps or combat engineers like an increase in 1371s. Every single 1371 is taught basic demo in their schoolhouse. And so now we've got combat engineers which are already in the divisions, in the infantry divisions, who all have a basic understanding of basic demo principles in electric demo. So this means you don't need to have any sort of new production lines. You don't have to rely on any new vendors. This is just C4 and blasting caps basically. And all we have to do is work to just change the modification of the demo, the basic demo that are already understood, change it a little bit, but they already know 90% of it. So now we've got 1371s like an increase out there teaching Marines across the FMF, basic demo with a slight modification, the scale it for these drones. A lot of junior Marines that they're scared, you know, when you speak about demolition, think that as soon as I touch it, it's going to explode or something like that. So a lot of it is just sets and reps. So we spoke a lot about crawl walk, method. And that's the same that we do with the payloads. We do a lot of sets and reps and we use a Play-Doh inert blasting cap, things that are sort. And it's just a basic demolition package. It's not a deep thing. Most of it is just allowing the Marine to touch the demolition and let them know that it's not nothing is going to happen if you touch it. It doesn't just gonna happen if you clip this court. As long as you follow the procedures and you pay attention and you understand the dangers of the demolition, it will always go boom. You'll never have an issue with any of those other things. So a lot of it is just confidence. - A term they use a law which can be taken the wrong way. We've TTPed our way to safety. You heard Gunny talk about that, right? If we think of an M67 fragmentation grenade, it can be super dangerous if you don't fall the steps, right? So if I remove the thumb clip, take out the safety pin and then I release the spoon before I throw it, like that thing's gonna go off in four seconds, right? So there's TTPs that build on the inherent engineering safety of that. We trust the system, it's been validated through we serve, through guys like CO5 Pierce All, but the TTPs that Gunny Kreesman and Gunny Sturd and the team teaches keep it safe. And that's why we're 100% success rate with it. - So just for the listener at home, we're looking at a board with different photos that the Marines are gonna describe to us here. - So one of the kind of intangibles about the training we've been able to conduct since around October across all the bases is yes, we've trained a significant amount of Marines directly, but what's been nice is the indirect Marines that we've trained, range control, installation commands, other commanders of all capacities on how to approach this style of training and how to make it safe for the Marines to execute the training that they were just taught. So we had that opportunity very recently with the Marine Rotational Force Darwin. We were asked to essentially help Victor 15, who was an deployed unit, essentially make a scenario that was safe, but also realistic to what we could face in the future. So what we're looking at is a counter landing exercise to which a team of Marines from 15 executed two strikes on one moving and one non-moving amphibious vehicle. So we were there to kind of big brother them and make sure that they were executing things safely and we stepped in where needed, but it was very minimal and it was very cool to see those Marines to kind of cruise point just doing the procedures that they were taught. There's no deviation. There was questions about planning side of it, but the procedures they had no issues with and being able to kind of show that to the joint force that was there was also something unique. I had never been a part of a counter landing exercise that was live, but I've been a part of some of these joint training events and this was the first time that I've seen the level of energy and engagement. Hey, what's that thing going on over there and to have these junior Marines like the pilots were both Lance Corporals and to have them in the play of the scenario defeat the last command control vehicle in the attack was something that was just phenomenal to see. We talk about how what you guys are doing for very good reason are different from what the Ukrainians have done even though they've sort of showed the way in many ways. I have two questions on that. One is to what extent have you reached out or not reached out to Ukrainians directly to inform some of your training here and also there's a higher level here on employment when it comes to EW use of fiber optic cable drones to what extent does that inform the training course here? First on Ukraine. So one of your dear friends, Michael Kaufman has been in this space conducting PMEs with us helping us understand this. We have had multiple engagements with different Ukrainian units who are specialized in this if that's the right word. We have had United States Marines who have the part of active duty and have been fighting coming back who have advised us all on this journey. So in short on the first heavily, and we obviously read their pubs and one of the initial versions of how we T.O.D. or set the table of organization for how we're training was built on Ukrainian. So in short, quite a bit. You can always do better. You can always learn. It's a very dynamic situation. We review Maggie, are you probably see comes has a monthly report that lays out every single strike that they do, the variant of drone, their success rates. So we are keenly aware of all of that and track it all. Two degree, I approach it kind of like looking at the results of a classifier match in the shooting world. If someone beat me, I want to know what equipment they had and what training set them up to beat me. And then it's just a matter of reallocating my time and resources to beat them in the long run. None of this would exist without them. I mean, they showed that this is possible and this is doable and it's scalable. And so if not for what they had figured out and how effective it is, none of this would be here right now. To the second question, the different variants. So we've spoken predominantly about radio frequency control drone. So the drone sitting on the table of the archer is in Ukraine. It is very successful in Ukraine. Most recent reports on an 85% success rate. They don't have not there employing tens of thousands of drones per month. So they don't have tens of thousands of archers. So just want to caveat. They have different drones that they use more. There's a highly effective system because the way it operates makes it very difficult. Meaning it is a wide band frequency and it's frequency hopping. So if you're trying to jam it, it stands in around the spectrum. The entire time there's a low band high band, et cetera, option to it. We have employed fiber systems. You asked before we got on the recording. OSW's drone dominance program in the Gauntlet series start and block up on the team. And Chief Onus or Gunnar Hoteling and Chief Onus appeared to hold down and bending. There is one of the best drones in Ukraine is called the Shrike, sometimes known as Skycutter. And we will receive that drone. We have flown it. But to everything that's Steve, walking through the explosive part of it, the Ukrainian method for doing that is different than how we've been directed to train. So we're working through that. But in short, we use a variety of drones, different, employed during the day. It's obviously sunny out right now. Sometimes we employ these at night. So we're learning a bunch from it. You guys here are tied in. This isn't just what Marines are doing. It's part of a larger enterprise about what the department is doing and the other services are doing. Scott, I know you are changing command soon. You're going on to your next assignment. Some new Marines, I imagine, are staying. What are sort of the next steps, not just for this unit, but from your perspectives anyway, for the department overall when it comes to drone adoption and drone training? It is super exciting to think about where we were as Marines, where we were as the department a year and a half ago to where we are now. So micro Marine Corps, if that's the right way to say it, bottom line high point, zero FPV attack drones in October, we have over 3,500 fielded today. If we're having this conversation around the new year, so six or so months from now, we're going to have somewhere around 50,000 small lethal drones. We have this conversation two summers from now. We're going to have well over 100,000 for the listeners as a giant team effort. So what's tangibly happened here, Congress gave the department over a billion dollars with the encouragement of figure out how to learn from Ukraine and get these capabilities scaled inside the department, the department organized itself through something that is known as the drone dominance program. The secretary ordered it. The honorable west out of D.I.U. is leading it. His point person, because he's responsible, all the portfolios in the defense innovation unit, his point person for drone dominance specifically is Mr. Travis Metz. And there's probably not been many days in the last nine months that we have not interacted daily. So for the Marine Corps, our way forward is we will, for example. So it's the middle of May, a couple of weeks from now, elements of the team of the Marine sitting here will be in camp grilling, Michigan, with the Office of Secretary of War's drone dominance program at a qualifier event. So if you're a drone vendor listening to this, put out a re-- they being the drone dominance program, put out a request for solution to solve certain tactical problems. And a few of answers to that show up to camp grilling. And there are dozens upon dozens of vendors showing up. The Marines here will observe those drones. There will be phenomenal rangers that we've been working with on a daily basis, phenomenal seals that we have been working with. And then out of those many dozen, they will pick the best. And then they will show up in August to an event called Gauntlet 2, which is a competition. And it's not-- you know, someone's excuse me, like PowerPoint brief, or I'm friends with this person. None of that. Your drone needs to perform in these tactical scenarios. And you've got the best warfighters who understand these technologies, who will rate, and that's what you see on the drone dominance for those who are unfamiliar with this. If you go to the drone dominance program, and you go to the leaderboard, the top 11 drones at Gauntlet 1 were evaluated by the best Marines in the business, the best seals in the business, the best rangers in the business. And we work on all of this all the time. And solely, obviously, it ranges as a soldier. There's a variety from the 101st and from the 82nd and 1/73. So this effort from top down-- and it's a team effort-- the Marine Corps providing one part of the input because of the great work from some of these Marines. We talked to Travis, maybe more than others. I don't know. But we'll see. But yeah, that's kind of the trajectory of the way forward. Our senior-- the guidance from the coming on down is consistent. So it doesn't really matter. Marines rotate all the time. So we'll have new Marines. They'll come in and we'll operate on the same guidance. And we'll get the mission accomplished. Thank you so much for listening. 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