ORCHARD COMBAT TRAINING CENTER, Idaho – Oregon Guard Soldiers breached a wire obstacle with a drone-delivered Bangalore torpedo after months of innovation by engineers whose work could help save lives.
In combat, breaching that type of obstacle on foot would be expected to carry significant risk. Army doctrine uses a 50% casualty-planning factor for a deliberate breach.
"The most casualty-producing thing that Army engineers do is the breach," said 1st Lt. Andrew Lucas, who co-led the working group from the battalion S-3 section. "Expect 50 percent casualties. If you can deliver something to clear the breach with a $40,000 drone, instead of putting Soldiers in harm's way, that's worth experimenting with."
On June 22, a heavy-lift drone climbed into 25-mile-per-hour gusts above the high desert, carrying a live Bangalore torpedo toward a wire obstacle. The drone released the charge. Shock tube unspooled cleanly behind it. Soldiers from B Company, 741st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team, took cover. The Bangalore detonated, opening a lane through the wire – a lane that, in this iteration, no Soldier had to sprint across to deliver.
The proof-of-concept on Range 22 marked the close of a months-long innovation effort by the 741st Brigade Engineer Battalion's drone working group. The group was established by battalion commander Lt. Col. Eric Zimmerman with a directive to defeat a wire obstacle using a commercial off-the-shelf or similar drone during the battalion's annual training.
The working group's research found no precedent for the tactic in the U.S. Army.
"Mostly Ukraine," Zimmerman said when asked what drove the concept. "Watching what was going on in Ukraine, and how innovative they are, it inspires you to get better and think bigger."
Zimmerman said his intent was to apply emerging technology to a problem engineers already know how to solve.
"I want us to talk about drones around something we already do really well, which is defeating obstacles," he said. "So let's do this non-doctrinal thing, but surround it with doctrine."
The working group, led by Lucas and Capt. Samuel Cushing, the battalion's plans officer, with input from senior noncommissioned officers, including 1st Sgt. Joshua Martin, first studied commercially available drones priced between $2,000 and $40,000. After funding for a commercial purchase did not come through, the team turned to the Oregon Army National Guard's 249th Regional Training Institute, whose existing drone-build program could not produce an airframe with the lift capacity the mission required.
Rather than abandoning the effort, the battalion's operations section continued pursuing alternatives. Working from the specifications developed by the drone working group, industry partners were vetted before determining that Lorica Technologies could meet the requirements.
The Mule 28, a heavy-lift, multi-mission unmanned aerial system, was designed and built in-house at Lorica Technologies' Ashland facility.
The airframe weighs roughly 45 pounds, lifts about 200 pounds and is powered by eight motors turning eight 28-inch bi-bladed propellers. Lorica founder and CEO Christopher Dye said the company's software, including a swarm-control system the company calls Hive, is what makes the platform distinct.
"It doesn't matter what the vehicle is, as long as we understand the capabilities and the parameters of the vehicle," Dye said. "We can task the swarm based on what the job needs to get done. Right now, we're working on natural language control, so that you can just talk to the bird and tell it, 'Hey, I want a reconnaissance around this building. I need to know how big that ditch is before we get there, how many steps, how high the windows are.'"
The company had roughly six weeks to develop the airframe for the Oregon project.
Going through a domestic manufacturer to build to specification rather than buying a commercial drone was a deliberate choice that protected the project from electronic warfare and supply-chain vulnerabilities, Cushing said.
The team built safety into the project by stepping up the live-explosive risk in stages. Every iteration involving live explosives was initiated using a shock tube spooled from the drone to the obstacle. The team deliberately avoided an electronic trigger that could be jammed or prematurely activated.
Officers said the broader value of the project lies in giving engineers a tool tailored to their core mission rather than borrowing from the infantry-led drone applications that have dominated the field so far.
Lucas said the next conceptual step is autonomy.
"We're not that far technologically from a drone that has an AI processor on it that could identify where concertina wire is. And you could put in a rough coordinate of, 'Hey, I know the obstacle's there,' and you could send it to autonomously deploy the Bangalore on the wire with near-perfect precision, where there's no possibility of it being jammed, because it's all running off of internal direction,” Lucas said.