The Marine Corps is standing up a new organization designed to rapidly turn battlefield drone lessons, like best practices for defeating hostile drones or using them to spy on and attack an enemy, into standardized training for more Marines.
Drone warfare is evolving quickly and has reshaped battlefields. To meet the challenge, the new Marine Corps Robotics Integration Group, or MCRIG, will serve as the service’s hub for institutionalizing training on small drones and counter-drone systems across the force, according to a press release from the Corps’ Training and Education Command.
At the same time, the service is also launching its new Marine Corps Counter Drone Team to test emerging counter-drone technologies and tactics, a defensive sibling to the service’s offensive drone team it created last year.
Earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Benjamin Watson, who oversees Training and Education Command, told Business Insider about the expected creation of the counter-drone team, explaining that the Corps intended to “pressurize the learning and dedicate a small, highly qualified group of individuals to learning just as fast in the counter-drone space as we have been in the drone operation space.”
The Corps hopes its two new teams will speed up the journey from experimentation, consolidated within its offensive and defensive drone teams, to broader training across its units before Marines deploy to combat zones.
At the Marines’ annual symposium in April, another Marine Corps general shared the outcomes of a recent exercise in which Marines faced off against drones in the field.
“It went about as expected,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Clingan, who oversees Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command, adding that during the training, “the Marines had a really difficult time going downrange and dealing with the drones.”
The Marines are also in the middle of figuring out which troops make the best drone pilots, how to standardize training pipelines, how to differentiate between friendly and hostile drones, and how to defeat drones on the move.
These efforts come as the broader military continues to grapple with the opportunities and threats that come from the proliferation of drones, particularly small, low-cost uncrewed aerial systems, and learn lessons from recent conflicts, from Ukrainian battlefields to fights in the Middle East. Employing them offensively is one thorny challenge. The second is finding large-scale, reliable methods for defeating enemy drones.
“The battlefield continues to demonstrate that small unmanned aircraft systems are no longer niche capabilities,” said Clingan in a released statement. Drones, many of which are small enough to fit in a single hand, are now indispensable for military missions like reconnaissance and offensive strikes.
