The Dawn of the Loitering Munitions Era

Will the U.S. Army heed the lessons learned over the past three decades - most recently by the Russians and Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh regarding the disruption wrought by loitering munitions on todays battlefield? Until measures specifically addressing operations in the presence of loitering munitions make their way into Army doctrine, manuals, and training pipelines, our Soldiers remain vulnerable. For many years, scholarly articles, books, and publications warned, with varied degrees of urgency, about the inevitable next step in the development of unmanned weapons platforms. At the mention of drone warfare, most casual observers still think about the Predator and Reaper drones of the War on Terror vintage. However, the next step in unmanned warfare - and warfare in general - is already here. These new weapon systems have many names: kamikaze drones, loitering munitions, and suicide drones, to name a few. They also differ in terms of capabilities, sophistication, autonomy levels, and capacity to cooperate in a swarm. However, they are all inexpensive, impossible to control in terms of proliferation, and they are here today. The latest conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh demonstrated that modern loitering munitions are causing a revolution in land warfare similar to the introduction of the machine gun. While the United States is developing similar offensive capabilities, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive change to doctrine and training across the U.S. military to enable operations in environments with a significant prevalence of enemy loitering munitions.