- 6 months ago
Go inside a US Army combat training exercise in Germany, where drone pilots are being trained 400 miles from the Ukraine border.
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00:00these drones built by the army soldiers flying them only cost about $500 a piece and the army
00:09is betting that they could be the difference on the battlefield these soldiers training on
00:14a base in southern Germany are about 400 miles away from the Ukraine border these
00:25army soldiers dressed in all black or pretending to be the enemy in training they're known as off
00:34or opposing force being attacked by army soldiers in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment or 2CR to see our soldiers
00:49use a drone to fly over and around a trench held by the Op4 this distraction gives the assault team
01:03a window to breach the Op4's defense and successfully seize the trench I honestly think that that drone
01:14was there just to harass us and annoy us the way that thing is just flying around I hell if I could
01:19beat that guy I won't shake his head until he's a good damn pilot we were just harassing and
01:25distracting the Op4 in the trench it's very loud it's very fast you can't really counter it you
01:31can't shoot it down you're not going to be able to hit it you're not going to be able to shoot it down
01:36the army said it will spend 36 billion dollars modernizing the force over the next five years
01:45with a heavy emphasis on drones business insider went inside a combat training exercise with soldiers
01:54who build and fly drones to find out what's working and what needs work
02:04what you see here is the Bavarian countryside in southern Germany tucked away in these hills is a 63
02:20square mile training facility called the Hohenfels training area it's where the US Army's 2nd Cavalry
02:27regiment is conducting a training exercise known as sticks lanes sticks stands for situational training
02:36exercise these soldiers are going to go in platoon by platoon with a simple mission get eyes on an
02:44objective which is a series of trenches seize it and clear it during this training exercise I spent a
02:54lot of time with army drone pilots these soldiers develop drones that they built in the drone
03:00innovation cell at grafenware training area and then they come down here to Hohenfels training area to
03:05deploy that technology in a combat training environment I'm here at the drone innovation cell here in
03:21Germany where the soldiers are learning to not only fly drones but they're also learning to build them
03:27all of them were completely designed built and flown by two CR soldiers UAS unmanned aerial systems
03:36historically particularly within the US military it's been treated almost exclusively as an ISR platform so
03:42intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance it's changed drastically I'd say in the last couple of
03:48years due to some obvious influence from the ongoing war in Ukraine with us observing the Russo-Ukrainian
03:54war we're seeing the significant impact that drones are undeniably having the US military is seeing that
03:59and figuring out where we can integrate that into our formations to increase our overall lethality this
04:06drone is a seven inch fully 3d printed drone and it can be used to carry any type of payload that you wish one
04:16example I just have this little dummy you know dummy ammunition here it would slide in to this
04:21portion and that's how it would lock in and then when the operator or pilot is flying this they would
04:27just need to press you know a safety and then a release and then it would cause ammunition to fall
04:32from the drone these drones according to the army cost about five hundred dollars a piece that's very
04:41inexpensive compared to a lot of the high-end drones that are out there the price point remains incredibly
04:48low we're designing 3d printing our frames and then assembling the drones using existing components
04:53I would say about ninety nine point eight percent of all of the drone equipment that exists in the world
04:58comes from one country and that's a country that we cannot we should not buy components from these
05:05components though come from Europe they use these headsets and these headsets allow the pilots to
05:14see what the drone sees as it's in flight very light it's not like a virtual reality headset or a meta
05:21quest or anything like that lighter than ski goggles I would say is this difficult it's more difficult
05:32than a regular drone you have to like you you control everything that this drone does it's not
05:36doesn't like self stabilize at all with piloting you know who gets to be a part of it I personally
05:42would say anyone that has the extreme interest in it so there is a certain level of it that requires
05:47some hard skills having soldiers that have been trained by the army already to do things like
05:52soldering and do things like wiring definitely helps and those people have been given priority to
05:57to learn how to do that do soldiers who have an acumen for gaming are they particularly attractive
06:04a hundred percent when the unmanned systems force of Ukraine was created one of their initial slogans
06:08was for those who were born with a joystick in their hand and I have seen that 100 play out to be the case
06:13the top pilots of people who are learning the fastest able to fly the most controlled fly the fastest
06:20those are the soldiers who when they get off on Fridays they go and play you know video games when
06:272CR goes out to the field in a few days they will be using this exact equipment with these exact drones
06:322CR is getting ready to start their convoy to the Hohenfels training area where the big training
06:44exercise is going to happen I got to see the drone packed up in a sort of makeshift ruck to carry the
06:51drones we'll kind of see and then just kind of feedback and then adjust it based on how it
06:56works you know initially what I'm concerned about is all this is going to get you know you're going to
07:01get in the wood line and it's going to get hung up on stuff I was thinking about taking off the props
07:07how to get there and then just waiting for uh to lift up and then I'll put it out cool well done
07:11there man the two CR soldiers travel in a convoy of striker armored combat vehicles
07:23after a 40-mile ride down the German Autobahn they reach Hohenfels training area a place the soldiers
07:33affectionately refer to as the box we're heading to the box I'm riding in a Humvee now to link up
07:42with the soldiers that traveled in the strikers 300 for each to goon and then 800 for each gun all
07:56right so we're about to leave this area and head into the box and I'm actually going to ride in the
08:01striker with the soldiers how's it going all right where should I sit we've got four drones here in the
08:13striker vehicle strikers moving it's just me and two drone pilots back here this is basically the
08:19drone mobile how'd you end up being a drone pilot uh voluntold actually yeah it's uh ended up going
08:26to a class uh it's a two to three week course we're driving along with the striker now it's um it's
08:34going at a pretty fast clip it definitely like smells like fuel in here
08:39got up the striker the soldiers dismounted quickly
08:52the drone pilot got caught in a really thick sharp vine and he didn't have any help to get him out and
09:20he essentially just had to yank himself out of there incoming the soldiers moved up a hill one
09:29four golf this is one six the lieutenant asked the drone pilot to get the drone up in the air to do
09:36some recon so he started to try to get the drone ready to go all the different components the drone
09:42the headset the controller but then he struggled when he couldn't get a video link from the drone's camera to
09:51the headset i believe one of the cords um on the v-tech uh server staffed okay it's uh wires have been
09:59frayed okay compromises the beat as soon as it gets back to as soon as you're back to the eyes we chuck it over to
10:06dakota he thought that getting snagged in that vine is is what did the damage to that that cable that
10:14provides the video feed wasn't even paying attention to the tree kind of got tunnel vision and wanted to
10:19just follow the dude in front of me and ended up getting caught we're still so new to having drones
10:23with us kind of just grabbed a bag and threw it on there and hoping it works and i think that it being
10:28it's so exposed itself uh it was actually one of the problems six we're going to conduct our leaders
10:34recon from orp at this location break so when they couldn't get the drone up in the air they they
10:40did a leaders recon where they got a different look but just not not a drone's eye view we have
10:46to work through some problems in the field because we're innovating at a speed that we kind of haven't
10:51seen before in the past i think it's a really you know great thing that we're doing right now and
10:56that's a good problem to have the total investment for this project is two hundred ninety thousand
11:02dollars that covers 160 drones as well as the controllers and the headsets
11:11along with the drones assembled by the soldiers 2cr also uses drones made by the california-based company
11:19skydio part of a 100 million dollar contract the army awarded the company in 2022 trying to locate
11:29objective adder i've lost gps so i don't have access to maps all right don't worry about objective adder
11:35our primary focus is to worry about the ops over directly to our east we were just doing air reconnaissance
11:42trying to scout and see if we can find any of their fortifications if they have any or any sort of
11:47obstacles that they may have constructed i couldn't quite reach the objective from the point we're
11:53at so we're going to try to push further up the hill to get better a lot of sight on the objective itself
12:09so now we're on top of a mountain called old baldy here on the hohenfels training area and we've been
12:14with a drone pilot that's been doing some surveillance and reconnaissance trying to find the objective
12:20that the platoon is trying to seize i need to know the grid of that location immediately okay we've
12:25lost access to coin grid i've lost gps okay we'll just i need to be able to see it you need to find
12:30me i'm gonna be right up here okay first one wasn't able to reach the objective because it lost link
12:38we're hoping that the second one is able to with a better line of sight from where we're currently situated
12:42now another drone pilot has linked up up here on old baldy and he is going to be using one of the fpv
12:52drones that's first person view where he wears the headset so that he can see what the drone sees
12:57on his first attempt he had a bad connection getting to that location was difficult because there is a
13:14massive ridge line in between here and there that ridge line blocks the video transmission between
13:20the drone and my goggles so i lost control of it i tried to gain altitude to regain that video link but
13:28even gaining as much altitude as it could let me would not we regain that link so he had to get another
13:36drone he had a few with him so he got one of his backups i got really clear well for a second clear
13:46signal a few of the lessons learned we need an extended coaxial cable to extend the range so
13:52are you finding the range is not as long as you wish absolutely it's not nearly as long as i need
13:59i can keep it where it's at and show you the video i need an external monitor for leadership to observe
14:05what i'm seeing so they can direct me and they can see what i'm seeing and where i'm located at i don't
14:12have any more screws for the propellers so either way we can't fly anymore we're learning a ton of
14:16things right now right okay so that's all valuable lessons learned and like you know first art please
14:21dig the or you know write these down uh so we can pass this up to our folks across the regiment cool
14:29even though they got both drones up both dealt with different issues connectivity issues camera issues
14:35what was cool was that the drone team would like take a piece from one drone put it on the other
14:41sort of frankenstein the drones just to make them work and they did they got the opportunity
14:47to get eyes on the objective and relay that information to their leadership and continue with
14:52their mission the global war on terror we had uncontested air dominance because anything that flew
15:03was u.s government stuff now that's not the case i'm having to train soldiers to react to uas
15:09and they may not know if it is a friendly a foe or a neutral uas it's a markedly different
15:14environment and it makes it challenging we understand that that is going to be commonplace
15:19on today's battlefield after successfully using drones to locate the enemy objective
15:25apache 3-4 a 2cr platoon moves in
15:39hey we got drone drone
15:42a 2cr pilot uses a drone to harass and distract the op 4 soldiers
15:47creating an opportunity for 2cr to seize the trench
15:56help here take a knee pull security that way what you're doing there what was going on with
16:01that drone that was flying during the ambush i honestly think that that drone was there just to
16:05harass us and annoy us because especially with that very loud motors that it's using to fly around
16:10it's quite loud and it kind of distracts us to our main mission which is to defend the trench and
16:16the way that thing is just flying around i hell if i could beat that guy i want to shake his head
16:21until he's a good damn pilot
16:25we got to see the drones be effective we also saw some of the struggles that they're dealing with and
16:30some things that they're gonna take back to the lab and address but as the sergeant major said
16:36these are good lessons and this is why they're out here is to test things and see what works see
16:41what doesn't and then go back to the drawing board and hopefully have the technology updated for the
16:46next training exercise
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