Over the last several years the public has become acutely aware of the threat of quad-copter drones, by witnessing their battlefield effectiveness in Ukraine, where Russian tanks, trenches, and even individual soldiers have been destroyed by quad-copter drones carrying an explosive payload.
The U.S. Army has taken note of these developments and has begun its own experiments in training scenarios. Recently, the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division has been training soldiers to qualify piloting commercial off-the-shelf quad-copter drones and determining how they can be employed even in the jungle.
Currently, two drones are available to infantry units. One is the Raven, a fixed-wing drone that usually supports battalion-level missions. A smaller lightweight drone is the Black Hornet 3. While the Raven is too big to be flown in support of dismounted squads moving through the jungle, the Black Hornet is too small and gets batted around by the wind and is easily damaged by flying into trees, writes 1st Lt. Alex Choy in this month's edition of Infantry magazine.
The solution, 25th ID found was a quad-copter drone called the Anafi Parrot. Soldiers could be quickly trained to pilot it under the jungle canopy in about an hour, whereas the Raven requires at least three weeks of training. In exercises, a 25th ID Infantry squad would patrol through the jungle with the quad-copter pilot guiding the drone using an android device. The drone was used to scout up ahead of the squad's movements and if enemy activity was spotted, they would call in a fire mission on that position before moving on.
However, they also discovered the limitations of flying a drone in the jungle. The dense foliage sometimes interferes with the drone's GPS guidance system. In combat, there is the possibility that enemy electronic warfare units will hone in on the drone's radio frequency and call in an air strike on that position.
The author suggests terrain masking to defeat enemy EW units, while an Inertial Navigation System utilizing accelerometers and gyroscopes rather than GPS would help mitigate the connection issues between the pilot and the drone.
25th ID has trained over 100 soldiers to pilot the Anafi Parrot drone thus far.