The US Army wants to have “bomber drones” like in Ukraine
The US military emphasizes that where relatively cheap solutions can be used, they should be used
The U.S. Army plans to use so-called “bomber drones” in service, based on the experience of using similar unmanned aerial vehicles by the Ukrainian military against the Russian occupation forces directly on the battlefield, Defense One reports.
The request for the development of “small lethal UAVs” was submitted by the Army Applications Laboratory (AAL), which was established in 2018 under the leadership of the Army Futures Command, and whose main task is to look for commercial developments that could be integrated into effective tools for the military that can be used on the battlefield.
An example of the effective work of “drones with bombs” from the SBU Special Forces
The request notes, among other things, that drones are really useful on the battlefield and that in the future a drone may be “a common tool in the equipment of an infantry platoon.” And that the emergence of such UAVs is “vital for the future combat operations of the army.”
Today, a number of requirements for such drones are already known: first, such drones must be from the so-called Blue UAS list, a verified list of drones from the Pentagon, which includes quadcopters like the DJI Mavic 3. The following is noted separately: for some reason, the Laboratory’s list separately prohibits UAVs with vertical takeoff and landing WingtraOne, but the reasons are not specified.
Secondly, the military should have the option to drop ammunition from drones using UAV controllers, and that eventually this feature should be included in “ATEK” – probably referring to the ATAK android application, which is used for live video broadcasting, among other things.
Thirdly, the ammunition that such drones will be armed with must be more powerful than the M67 fragmentation grenade, which weighs 0.4 kg – at the same time, the US Army is already working on using these grenades in conjunction with the Skydio X2D quadcopter. The drones can also potentially be armed with a more powerful anti-tank warhead and used as an alternative to Javelin missile systems, which have also demonstrated their effectiveness in Ukraine.
