The US Army has warned that drones and artificial intelligence are transforming warfare at a speed never seen before, with senior military leaders telling lawmakers that future conflicts will increasingly depend on low-cost unmanned systems and rapid battlefield automation.
The remarks came during a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee, where top Army officials repeatedly pointed to the Ukraine war as evidence of how small drones, AI-assisted targeting and scalable autonomous systems are reshaping combat operations.
US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said militaries that fail to modernise quickly risk falling behind in future wars, especially as Washington shifts its strategic focus towards the Indo-Pacific region.
“Drones are reshaping how humans will inflict violence on each other at a pace never witnessed in human history,” Driscoll told lawmakers. “They are cheap, modular, precise, multi-role, and scalable.”
He said the Army was aggressively integrating battlefield AI, autonomous systems and open command networks into future military planning.
Ukraine war lessons now shaping US military doctrine
Army leaders told lawmakers that battlefield experiences from Ukraine and the Middle East were now being rapidly folded into US military training and operational doctrine.
General Christopher LaNeve said the Army was accelerating changes inside its training institutions to reflect the changing nature of warfare.
“We’re taking a lot of lessons learned from both Ukraine and OEF,” LaNeve said, referring to Operation Enduring Freedom. “It’s moving at a much faster rate into our schoolhouse and into our doctrine.”
Lawmakers from both political parties raised concerns over whether the Army’s budget priorities were fully aligned with its public emphasis on drone warfare.
Representative Eugene Vindman questioned why funding for small unmanned aircraft systems had fallen compared to earlier years despite repeated warnings about the growing importance of drones in combat.
Driscoll defended the strategy, saying the Army was prioritising the creation of a manufacturing ecosystem that could rapidly scale up drone production during wartime instead of maintaining massive stockpiles in peacetime.
“What Ukraine is producing, I think it’s about 5 million drones. Russia is about the same,” he said.
“We are not going to be at a place where we need to manufacture as a nation 5 million drones until we’re in conflict, but we need to be able to get there really quickly.”
‘Operation Jailbreak’ aims to remove data barriers
During the hearing, Army officials also spoke about “Operation Jailbreak”, an integration programme underway at Fort Carson in Colorado aimed at improving battlefield data sharing between military systems.
Driscoll criticised existing defence platforms for operating as isolated systems that often struggle to communicate with one another during operations.
“Every single system that creates a piece of data should be able to share that data anywhere we, the United States Army, need it to go,” he said.
The Army Secretary also warned that future drone warfare would require AI-assisted decision-making because human operators alone would not be fast enough to counter large-scale drone attacks and electronic warfare threats.
“When you’re thinking of drone swarms and the threats to react, a human being cannot do that alone,” Driscoll said.