School of War - Tanks vs. Drones

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Is the tank obsolete? As drones and precision strikes transform modern battlefields, some have predicted that armored vehicles may soon meet the fate of the cavalry charge. Today on School of War, Colonel Jose A. Reyes and Lieutenant Colonel David “Cam” Smith of the 1st Cavalry Division make the opposite case. Drawing on their experience operating and commanding tanks, they join Aaron MacLean to explain how armored vehicles are adapting to an increasingly drone-centric battlefield—and why the future of warfare may still belong to the cavalry. 3:18 — Reyes and Smith’s Backgrounds 8:40 — The History of Tanks and Maneuver 11:15 — Is the Tank Obsolete? 12:43 — “The Tank Is Alive and Well” 15:17 — Combined Arms at Every Echelon 20:12 — Transforming Armored Warfare 27:02 — The Battlefield Data Problem 30:01 — Ukrainian Innovation and Battlefield Data 33:25 — Electronic Warfare and FPV Drones 38:13 — Cheap Drones and the Cost of Defense 42:44 — Armor and the Problem of Attrition 43:49 — The Future of Unmanned Armor 46:51 — Unmanned Resupply and Medevac 48:25 — Casualty Evacuation in Ukraine 52:16 — What the Army Needs Next This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter and an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications.

Build at the speed of war. It's been quite a couple of weeks for School of War. Interviews with Boris Johnson and Ted Cruz, in which we discussed the wars in Ukraine and Iran, but really in the context of foreign policy. and the political level of war. Today, we're going to go back into the weeds and talk about the questionable future of armor in land warfare. And to me, this mixture of the political level of discussion and more specific dives into urgent issues of the business of war fighting is what school

of war is all about. The same goes for the way we mix episodes focused on military history with episodes focused on present-day conflicts. To really begin to understand war, I think you need to look at both its higher political levels and its basic tactical levels and everything in between. To understand the present and to form a plausible theory of the future of war, you need also to look at its past. The whole thing's an enormous task if you start to take it seriously. The silver lining for those of us who are endlessly curious about this stuff is that there's really no end to it. There's always something new to learn about war, and that's what we're about here at School of War. Today, we're back to war fighting and the future of the tank. The early 20

a century saw the end of horse cavalry and its replacement by tanks, well, sitting here at the beginning of the 21st century, you hear a lot of talk about how the day of these tanks is over. Boris Johnson even brought it up in our conversation earlier this week. In today's episode, we speak to two very smart U.S. Army colonels at the working level in the first cavalry division, a brigade commander and a battalion commander talking about the modern battlefield, the evolution of armor, and the work that they are doing to prepare the U.S. Army to be ready for whatever comes next. You'll hear a lot of the themes that we've covered on School of War in the last couple of years about unmanned systems and data management and the restoration of maneuver to the highly

visible battlefield, really going into the weeds of these questions with the guys actually doing the work. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war. This is to lock the invasion of war. December 7, 1941. The experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in grand. We shall fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never have no rest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Colonel Jose Reyes, who is the commander of the Second Armored Brigade Combat Team Blackjack First Cavalry Division. He's joined by Lieutenant Colonel David Cam Smith, who, until very recently was the commander of First Battalion,

9th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the First Cavalry Division. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining School of War. Thanks for having us, Aaron. I've really been looking forward to this conversation because we're going to get right to the heart of something I think is on a lot of people's minds when they look at the battlefields in the Middle East in Ukraine and especially in Ukraine, this question of the restoration of maneuver. What that means, how it looks here in the 2020s,

given a battlefield where visibility seems pretty universal. and movement very, very difficult indeed. So we'll come to that. But I want to ask you guys, before we really get into the present day, a bit about the first cavalry division in your careers in the organization. I mean, it's actually kind of elegant that we're having this conversation with senior leaders in that division, given that the tank and the transformation of the American cavalry in the beginning of the 20th century was sort of central to the question of restoring the maneuver to the battlefield a century ago.

Tell me, if you would, a bit about the first cavalry division, about your own associations with it and what it's been like to have a career in tanks. Sure, absolutely. Aaron, you know, the first cavalry divisions, you said, has got a strong lineage, has been first in a lot of things. And, you know, moving forward, even beyond today, will be the first in the army to field the next generation of a tank and infantry of fighting a vehicle. And so we're happy that the division is going to have that chance. But, you know, my association with the division started when I was a young major. I came here for the first time to the first cavalry division in Fort Hood, Texas as a major and did my key in developmental time with the first armored brigade combat team. I served as the battalion S3 for 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment,

and then the Brigade S3 for First Brigade. I also had the good fortune of commanding first battalion 12th Cavalry Regiment in third armored brigade combat team, Grey Wolf. a couple of years ago, and then was lucky enough to return to command the second armored brigade combat team. So I've I've served in the three brigades of the first cavalry division, first brigade, second brigade and third brigade now. And I can't imagine a better

place to serve. The first cavalry division has always been at the forefront of army transformation, as you said. And we're very happy to continue on that legacy for the Army and for our joint force. So you talked about restoring fires and maneuver. If you think back to a lot of our time, and I'm sure you're time, Aaron, and our basic courses where you have buddy team movement, right?

So your buddy is like, hey, cover me while I move. I got you covered, go ahead and move out. And you're sort of doing buddy team movement. And so how do we do that at an armored brigade combat team level, at an armored division level is what I'm excited to talk about today. because we've been working pretty hard at it. Yeah, this is my third time in the First Cavalry Division. I came here as a lieutenant and spent time in the division as a lieutenant and a captain

going to Operation Iraqi Freedom 2 and then the surge with the division. I came back as a major and served as a squadron executive officer and then the brigade operations officer of First Brigade Iron Horse. And then I came back and was looking up to Command 1-9 Cav as part of Coroner's brigade here recently. So it's been really full circle to watch the division continue to adapt. Over the last 20 years, the battlefield has changed, the conditions have changed, and the division continues to change to make sure that they stay at the lethal edge.

I want to talk about the issue at hand, which is maneuver and sort of armor's role in maneuver, but your reference, Colonel Reyes to buddy team movement, which of course anyone who's served in ground combat arms, certainly in the infantry, has that sort of seared into them possibly in unpleasant ways, from their training days, but it's seared in there because it's important. I don't know if you gentlemen knew this, but if you've ever had the opportunity to visit the Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia,

which I recommend is a great museum. You know, the Marine Corps, as you gentlemen know, does two things really well. It wins battles and it talks about itself. And in the Marine Corps Museum, there's a great, actually, exhibition on World War I. And there's this movie about, you know, the Battle of Bella Wood,

is done with Hollywood special effects and everything. And in the exhibit, they'll tell you, how the Marine Corps actually invented Buddy Team movement, literally in the field outside of Bellow Wood, the Marines were under fire from the Germans. And in that moment, they sort of figured it out and just started buddy rushing. And thus Buddy Team Movement was born.

So I don't know if you gentlemen were briefed on that yet, but I just thought I would share the good news with you on the Marine Corps origin of all that. Well, no, that's great. It is a great museum. It's been several years since I've been there. The Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belmontville, Virginia, is pretty good too.

But I don't have a story like that that I can share with you about the U.S. Army Museum. Well, it's a good, it's actually there are only a few miles from each other. It's a good doubleheader of a day, especially if you have kids in tow. Okay, so let's get a little historical then about sort of the foundations. Before we come to the present day, just the way that the role that armor has played in war fighting and the problem that it solved in the early 20th century from this sort of situation that many people have drawn the comparison between World War I and the present moment in Ukraine with the sort of protracted positional warfare. How did the tank help to solve that

problem? And what has the tanks or armors, broadly speaking, armor's role been in American warfighting doctrine or the armies war fighting doctrine perhaps up to the present before we get to the current set of problems? Sure. You know, you said it, right? What the tank helped solve was the breakthrough of a sort of a stalemate that we saw. And it's really not the technology itself, but the tactics behind the use of the technology. And so there, you know, there was a component of the United States Army that didn't want to go away from the horse, right?

The horse had ruled for for many, many years. And they thought like, hey, like, no, we got to keep the horse. We just got to use it differently. But, you know, they were sort of forced to learn that the tactics and not just of the horse, but of the overall army and armored force had to change. And so that's a very brief and nondescriptive way to talk about how the armored force came to use the tank. And back then, really known as the cavalry force. So the cavalry force adopted the tank.

We became the cavalry and armor branched different times. Both have existed. And then they had sort of melded together. But our ability to use the tank as sort of a breakthrough formation. is what really has helped win today. And that's how we sort of see it today as well, especially the war in Ukraine. There's a no man's land, if you will,

where forces are sort of staring at each other. And if anybody goes into the no man's land, it's not just a no man's land. It's a no anything land. And so anything that goes in there is going to get killed, destroyed, wounded, otherwise taken off the battlefield. And so the problem that we're trying to solve is how do you break in to that no man's land?

So it's similar to what we saw in sort of World War I. And then how do you break through it once you gain a foothold? Then how do you break out to continue the attack elsewhere? So there's this article authored, I gather by your division commander or two generals in partnership with one other, Major General Felty and Major, sorry, Major General Felty and Major Rosendale. called Restoring Fires and Maneuver and All Arms Wave-based approach at the tactical edge.

And I just want to read the first couple paragraphs because to me it describes the situation of the current battlefield as crisply, as I've seen it put anywhere. So just reading from the start of the piece, on the modern battlefield, every movement is exposed and punished by precision fires. Unmanned eyes haunt every contour of the terrain.

Fires and maneuver, a cornerstone of warfare, has withered under the weight of constant surveillance and instantaneous lethal actions. The result is a traditional positional warfare, stagnant lines, fortified positions, and a costly grind for every inch of ground. Maneuver is no longer denied by terrain or weather alone, but by the sheer destructive capacity

of the modern kill chain carried out on a transparent battlefield. Very well put. I would add that many conclude from this that actually the day of armor is done, that whatever the future of maneuver is, driving tanks or armored personnel carriers or what has, have you through a battlefield, through a forward line of troops like the one that currently exists out in Ukraine is essentially suicidal. So I just want to put that to you as a commonly entertained statement and get your response to it. Yeah, I've heard the same, right? But, you know, as I said, it's not just no man's land. It's a no anything land. And, you know, the number of

infantry that have been killed or wounded in that no man's land is pretty staggering also. And I've not heard anybody say, hey, it's the death of infantry. So when you talk about a no man's land like that and nothing can survive in it, it's not so much the X type of formation or Y type of technology can't exist anymore. That's the end of that. It's how do you change your tactics to be able to get through that? That's just the nature of warfare. The tank is alive and well.

So General Felti, you mentioned him, wrote that article. He wrote another article, the title, you know, The tank is dead. Long live the tank, right? So some people say it's dead and some people are saying, you know, long live the tank. Now, the M1E3 is going to change that, right? So we think that the key to overcome what we're seeing in Ukraine right now is combined arms at echelon. And so we don't necessarily have that in the United States Army today, but we're working towards that coupled with layered protection at echelon.

So if you envision a battlefield where you have fires and movement or fires and maneuver happening at the same time, coupled with layered protection, you're going to see a formation that's able to get through the type of fight that we're seeing right now in Ukraine and then continue on. So you think about the first cavalry division, we have the benefit of an organic air defense artillery battalion assigned to the division. And so they're able to defeat a certain kind of aerial threat or unmanned threat. If you incorporate technology, tactics, techniques, and procedures onto, you know, you think of a company of tanks. You have passive and active sensors that can pick up anything that got through the Air Defense Artillery Battalion bubbles. And then you can detect those threats and then have effectors to destroy those threats.

Now at each echelon, you have. you have the ability to destroy unmanned threats or even man threats and then restoring powers and maneuvers to then be able to attack and destroy an enemy is what the difference here is. So let's unpack both of those things then. So combined arms at Eschlon, you know, how low does that go? Are we talking about squad combined arms? I'd love to if we could, right?

But to be good stewards of, you know, of our military budget and, you know, our nation, we think that that's required down to the company level. And so at the National Training Center Rotation 26-02, which the Blackjack Brigade went to at Fort Irwin, California in October and November of 2025, we incorporated different formations and different technology that brought that down to the company level. And so the General Felte's article Restoring Fires and Maneuvers talks about the warfighting framework, which gives formations the ability to take. detect an enemy threat, suppress and shape that enemy threat.

So that's the first component is to detect it. Second component is to shape it or suppress it. And the third component is to employ precision fires to either continue to suppress them or destroy that threat. And then the fourth one would be to maneuver onto that. So if we picture at echelons or the division is using assets to detect an enemy force, they're employing, you know, whether it's a high, Mars or other rocket-based artillery to shape them and suppress them.

One of the things, as you know, right, it's hard to replicate in training the true suppressive effects of fire. But when you have bullets coming at you or indirect fire, just, you know, blowing up all around you, that's going to suppress it. You're going to get out of the way. And so now that you've detected the enemy. You're suppressing or shaping by destroying the enemy. And then you're using precision munitions to destroy some of the,

the high payoff targets that you see out there, whether it's a radar and their defense asset, you know, a tank that's tucked into the terrain, it's hard for a maneuver force to kill. And then the division uses that to maneuver its subordinate brigades onto an objective or onto an enemy force. While that's happening, the brigade is doing the same thing. So as the division is shaping, suppressing, and using precision fires to at trip the enemy, the brigade has already picked up with organic assets, detection of the enemy, either the same enemy that the division is looking at

or a slightly different enemy on the same objective or that's in a force that we want to destroy. So we're now detecting it with our organic assets. We're using our organic, I should say, direct support artillery battalion to shape and suppress that enemy. And then we're using precision munitions that we have at our level to same thing either destroy a high payoff target, suppress or destroy an enemy tank that just happens to be tucked into a wadi somewhere that nobody can get onto. And I am using that to maneuver my subordinate battalions onto an enemy force or onto an objective.

Cam or one of the other battalion commanders can do the same thing. He's using his organic assets to detect, shape, suppress, precision munitions to finish, to maneuver his subordinate companies onto an objective. And a company commander can do the same thing with UASs or other assets to detect an enemy. Mortars at the company level, which is one of the things we did at the National Training Center. So mortars to shape and suppress. And then whether it's P-BAS, FPV, or other assets, precision munitions to destroy a specific enemy that he or she sees, to then maneuver subordinate platoons onto an objective or onto an enemy force. And we'd love to get that same thing to the platoon level.

But right now we're using that down to the company level to be able to do just that. And so at every level from division down to company, you're detecting, suppressing, or shaping by attreating and destroying some of the enemy precision fires to continue to destroy. And we're starting to get the correlation of forces continuously in our favor so that our subordinate elements can maneuver onto an objective. So if you, again, think about an enemy that's out there starting to see these effects, they're going to either close the hatch or hunker down because they don't want to be destroyed by everything that's coming at them. And that allows the maneuver of forces to complete the destruction of the enemy. Let me ask you this.

It's really, really interesting. I want to stick with this for a while and, again, just kind of keep pulling the thread on different pieces of it. But you talk about combined arms at every echel on us or protection. Every echel will come to protection here in a second. aside from this question of pushing stuff down maybe to lower levels than it's been before, what else, if anything, about the concept you just outlined is different from how you would have talked about maneuver, say, 15 years ago? Yeah, the combined arm is certainly a big aspect of it.

And so you look at how the Army modernizes, right? It's a gross dot-mill PF. And so the cool technology is the material aspect. of dot milpf, but it's more than that. We have a role in updating our army's doctrine, and so we've worked with the armor school and the maneuverer center of excellence to update the cavalry squadron doctrine,

you know, armored strike platoon doctrine, which is still in the works and should be published here soon, and then, you know, armored brigade combat team and combined arms battalion doctrine, and so working on the doctrine component of it. Organizationally, we've changed the structure of our, some of our organizations to be able to account for

the battlefield currently and then what we see is the battlefield of the future and so, you know, part of that is giving company mortars. Part of that is changing sort of the way the the platoon looks and the construct. And so we've at the National Training Center

and the things that we're working on is the incorporation of a multifunctional strike troop. So in a mobile brigade combat team, right? So in the light infantry world, you've seen it refer to as the MFST, multi-purpose reconnaissance company, excuse me, so right? So they call it multi-purpose reconnaissance company. For them, it's a little bit different because they don't have a cavalry squadron anymore

or at their ability to detect the enemy has shifted based off of the loss of the cavalry squadron. And so they need the multi-purpose reconnaissance company to be able to pick up their detect function. For us in an armored brigade, we still have the cavalry squadron. We're fighting a them a little bit differently, but we still have them. And so our multi-functional strike troop, different name because it's got a slightly different function. We don't need it to detect all of the enemy. We need it to be able to detect a certain enemy. And so organizationally, we've incorporated a multifunctional strike troop at each combined arms with time.

They have a multi-purpose company, which gives them their ability to detect and then shapes a press and finish the enemy with precision fires. At the company level, we've experimented with and we've pitched to the Army different organizational structures so that we unencumber a company commander a little bit more and give them the ability to be able to fight, combine arms. So that's the organizational part of DotMilPF training. And I'm excited to talk here later on

to talk about how we've changed training a little bit. and some CAM and 119 CAV are a great example. At the National Training Center, they achieved a 96% survivability rate from their wounded in action there. The training environment, sure, but it's still unheard of at the National Training Center. It's quite an accomplishment.

Part of that is because of the training that we gave to our 68 whiskey medics, but also to our leadership, the spearheaded by the brigade commands are a major, so that every first sergeant across the brigade knew specifically their role for Kazavak and Medevac are medics being able to have more training in prolonged care. So that's the training aspect.

Material certainly, right, the different pieces of equipment that we got, our ability to have assured beyond line of site communications was super helpful. The different types of UASs and communications equipment that we received, the unmanned systems that we received to work with was certainly helpful. the leader development, right, our time that we took to develop our leaders to be able to not just understand the warfighting framework of restoring fires and maneuvers is the paper that General Feltte wrote, excuse me, but, you know, how do we fight as an armored brigade combat team, right? So across dot-milpf, we were able to attack multiple aspects to be able to make this brigade

more lethal. Now, did we get it perfect? We did not. We did not get it perfect, but we certainly learn some lessons that we are sharing, have shared, and continue to share with our counterparts in First Brigade. So Iron Horse Brigade, First Brigade of the First Cavalry Division, they will go to the National Training Center in March of next year. So just under a year from now, they will have had the benefit of more time training with this equipment. We sort of had a partial issue,

and a bunch of the equipment that we had was dismounted kit. Iron Horse will go to NTC with a mounted kit. And so whereas we had some tank commanders and Bradley commanders that had to have with their CVC and sort of tuck their hand mic into their helmet, they will be fully incorporated. And so I'm super excited to see how much Iron Horse can get after at the National Training Center and then beyond. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSWCDAO, Power. by the Palantir platform. Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem.

Right now, across the joint force, thousands of uniform service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, intel products, battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no weight.

The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. Well, I would question the quality of any exercise that let any unit that was participating in it walk away and say they had done it perfectly. So, no, I appreciate all that. I'll ask you a few more questions about the concept. So here's a question that had I heard a version of it when I was, you know, a young officer some 15 plus years ago, I would have probably curled up into a ball and asked to make it stop.

But here in my maturity, I realize that especially in the 2020s, this is kind of a huge part of the ball game, which is the question of data as part of the command and control of everything that you just described. Because what you just described, I mean, just to make kind of a dumb comment, it's just complicated. There's just a lot going on on the battlefield at any given moment. And the success of the concept you are outlining depends on the ability to, you know, identify all the right things at all the right times, suppress what you need to suppress, defend against, which you need to defend against a lot of decisions that have to be made,

quickly. In some respects, that's true of any battlefield ever. I could be describing any battlefield ever. But with precision as part of the picture, you're actually putting specific effects in specific places at scale. It's just a lot of stuff to monitor and decide about. How do you manage that picture as a commander at any level? Is there a common software solution to that that you are all using? How does that actually work? There isn't right now. the great thing. And again, for the Army to be good stewards to the taxpayer's money, the Army has given that problem set to the 4th Infantry Division

out of Fort Carson, Colorado. And so they at 4th Infantry Division are working on the next generation command and control systems. And so exactly the problem that you just described, Major General Ellis and his team are working on how do we solve that. And they've been doing some great things. I don't know if you had a chance to get out there and see any of the, any of the things that they're doing between Ivy Sting and Ivy Mass. They're going to be a project convergence out at the National Training Center

of Fort Irwin, California this summer. And they're working just that. They don't have it solved yet, but they're farther along today than they were even two weeks ago. It's a problem. It is. It's tough. And so what we did at the National Training Center, what we would have to do today, if we were forced to use this today somewhere in the world is track it's sort of the old-fashioned way.

And the old-fashioned way is charts and, you know, Excel spreadsheets and sort of, you know, marking this off and whatnot. It's not ideal. It's not ideal. That's sort of what we have right now and what Fourth Infringent Division is working to solve. But Cam, if you want to talk about how you did, it would be great. Yeah. I think that is a problem. I think that, you know, when you have a semi-transparent battlefield where there are,

sensors covering almost every part of it that it creates, especially for younger staffs, this problem of data inundation. And then how does that staff turn data and information? And then, you know, as a commander to a subordinate, how do I paint a picture for my boss that is information, not just this constant data stream? I think what we found and we were blessed with the division and a brigade leadership that, you know, let this, this blank canvas kind of occur with how we do this is how many decisions and authorities we could push down to these younger officers, the younger, you know, non-commissioned officers where they weren't asking permission throughout this fight. You know, they were, they were executing with permissions that were already

given to them before we crossed LD. And then as battalion commander, it was, are we on track? Has the conditions changed that we thought were going to be present? Do I need to tell my boss that we're ahead of schedule or behind schedule? But it was subordinate commanders, platoon leaders, platoon sergeants that were, you know, they have these tools in their hands now. We've given them precision munitions. We've given them mortars. And we've given them the authorities that come with it to execute targets that they know have to be prosecuted to move over the next IV line or to get on to an objective. So, you know, while the staffs and commanders do own information flow and turning that into decisions and its subordinate commanders that were able to really use new authorities and seize initiative as they saw it.

And that allowed us to maintain very high tempo. Yeah, I mean, I hope the Fourth Infantry Division makes progress there and that it proliferates out across the force. I say that because I was able to visit Ukraine earlier this year and see what they were able to do, you know, with live data. And this is, you know, these are incredibly brave troops fighting, you know, a noble fight. They're not the United States Army.

They don't have the United States Army's capabilities. And yet, I'm not familiar. with data management anywhere in the world. Maybe the Israelis and some of the leadership strikes they're able to pull off in Iran, but the kind of dated management that the Ukrainians have been able to do seems to me to be essential to their defensive success and slowing down,

you know, a much better resourced foe. My pet, I'm curious, you know, the pet theory I've been developing, and this is informed by discussions I've had with some folks in the U.S. Army, actually, and it's relevant to your role in the armor field is, you know, if the tank comes into being in the early 20th century and see some action World War I, you also see some action from aviation. But it doesn't coalesce. It doesn't really

function as a system until World War II. And what makes it function as a system is the introduction of the FM radio. It's not my original thought. Sort of, I think, a commonplace of which I was reminded by a very smart army officer recently. And to me, in the 21st century, that missing piece of the puzzle that makes the precision strike complex speed up, the thing that you're wanting to do at every level down to the company level to restore maneuver is AI. AI is the FM radio because it allows, first of all, you have some sort of common data management system and then you have the AI helping you prioritize both offensively and defensively what matters on the battlefield, sensitive topic, but maybe even at some point like act as well as identify. And without that,

I worry that no maneuver unit's going to get the pace required to maneuver, maybe not even to survive. Sure. I mean, that's one of the things that Fourth Infantry Division is working. And like you, I'm excited to see what they come up with. If you can picture, right, you pick your navigation app, right? Whether, whatever it is on your phone that gets you from point A to point B, what technology is able to do right now is whoever's on this app can report, hey, there's an

accident here, there's something on the road here, there's a police officer here, and then you driving from point A to point B know what's on your route. And so you can say, hey, I just, maybe you're not saying this exactly, but like you just pulled over to help this car stranded on the side of the road, changed their tire, and then moved on. And so you can put into your app, yep, that car is no longer there. And instantly everybody knows whether that car's there, the car's not there, the thing on the road is there or not there, whether there's traffic. And then that app will direct you if it's a good enough app, it'll say, hey, don't take this route, take this other one. So I don't know that, you know, we're able to get to that level of help immediately, right? But

maybe one day, we tell something, hey, this is our mission. And then it'll tell you, hey, there's this enemy force here. This is enemy force here. Somebody else just destroyed that one. It's no longer there. Now you can go this way. And so in a more transparent battlefield, it's not just where the enemy is. It's where the enemy isn't. That's going to help us be able to seize an objective or destroy an enemy force. Well, if anyone out there is listening with the ability to prioritize where we need rapid movement within the Department of War, I hope they agree with the upshot that this is essential. Let me also ask about electronic warfare and the proliferation of that at different echelons, because that's also been a major thing.

theme of the battlefield in Ukraine, maybe slightly dampened in the last, I don't know, six months or year or so by these wire-guided FPV drones. But of course, those proliferated in order to solve an electronic warfare problem. So this capacity, the ability to jam and evade jamming, how do you see that playing out as part of restoring maneuver for an organization like yours? Yeah, you know, this is why the opposing force in any of our combat training centers, is whether it's NTC at 4, you know, National Training Center in Florida over in California, the joint, you know, JRTC at Fort Polk,

JMRC overseas, et cetera. Like that opposing force needs to be the best fighting force there is. And so they have to have the ability to employ EW, UAS, fires at scale, et cetera, because what we want is when a training force goes to one of those CTCs, that's your hardest day in combat, right? And you go to actual comedy, oh, this is much easier than when I faced the opposing force that you named the CTC. And so at NTC, they are employing EW.

And so the benefit that a training brigade gets is how do we react to that? Some of that is recognizing first that there's a threat, reporting in that threat so that you either can deal with it yourself or a higher or adjacent unit can do that for you. and then employing the right TTPs to be able to do that. So you mentioned earlier that nobody wants to go to a CTC and say, hey, I did everything perfectly. No, we want to be challenged. We were certainly challenged at NTC 2602. The great thing is, you know, from the highest levels of the Army,

they emphasize to the National Training Center leadership. Hey, transformation in contact with an uppercase seat, right? Like it has to be in contact. We're not going to scale down the opposing force. We're going to make it the hardest opposing force that you can face. So that we dealt with unmanned aerial system threats, where we dealt with EW threats, et cetera. So this is one of those other areas that we're not certainly not perfect in.

There's a lot of work we got to do, especially at the brigade and below level. Some of the things that we experimented with was how do we identify that there's a threat out there and can we tip and cue a division level asset to be able to either destroy that themselves or, you know, tell us where it is so that we can maneuver onto that. You know, Cam face certainly some threats in the battalion as well. Yeah, and I think it's important to mention how much just training at Fort Hood has changed, you know, over the last couple of years to address, you know, these variables in the battlefield

where, you know, the days of just taking your tank company or battalion out and shooting gunnery and maybe doing some sort of maneuver exercise and coming back, and you maybe faced some sorts of opposing force. You did your A8R, everybody high-fived, said, you know, we did good or we did bad. You know, that's changed. When you go out to the training area is at Fort Hood now, you know, it's offensive and defensive electronic warfare. You know, there is something always in the air that's persistent overhead,

whether it's yours, whether it's the enemy's, you know, space-based effects. like Fort Hood has done an incredible job of making home station training as challenging as possible so that we get to the National Training Center or a Combat Training Center or God, you know, willing combat. Like it is not the first time you have faced it. It's not the first time you've trained against it, employed it yourself. You know, so I think the Army has moved in a really positive direction and the amount of training opportunities that there are for these types of variables. There are certainly some challenges to that, right? because in order to do that,

even at Fort Irwin in the middle of the Mojave Desert, you got to inform a bunch of different agencies, right? You got to say, okay, we're, you know, day out now. We're X number of hours out now, right? We're an hour out now. Hey, we're about to turn this thing on, right? You sort of for good and bad,

or you can't just turn it on whenever you want to because it's going to interfere with some other things. But within policy and within our capability, we absolutely incorporate that as much as we can. And again, there's still a lot of work to do. I'm not here telling you that we've got it all completely figured out, but we want to make sure that our unit face real world conditions as closely as possible, so that they can become better.

And then one other aspect of the modern battlefield, I'm curious how it integrates into your concept for maneuver for your organization, is this role of attritable mass or cheaper mass, you know, the concept that you outlined of combined arms at every echelon, protection at every echelon, that gets expensive real quick. And of course, you know, if the war only lasts a couple of weeks, then no big deal. But if the war lasts a couple of months, you start to feel some stress. And, well, at six months to a year, you start to feel a lot of stress. And as you know, one of the reasons why there's not as much maneuver in a place like Ukraine as you might anticipate is not just because

of visibility, but it's because of just the amount of stuff you need in your magazine to achieve the kinds of effects that would allow maneuver is exactly the kind of thing you're talking about. So I realize that the division level, even there's limited ability to kind of affect procurement and things like that. And in some level, this is kind of a procurement and even a procurement policy question. But just from your point of view as the end user and the consumer of this stuff, you know, where do we need to go in terms of you're not, you know, if you've got income drone swarms that you have to be protected against at every echelon, you build this system of protection at echelon, that's great. But if every time you shoot to defend yourself from something

that costs, you know, $5,000, $20,000, you're shooting something that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, that's not sustainable in the long run. How do you think about that? Sure. And it's not just magazine depth, right? It's also power generation. And so, like, whatever it is that we have, we have to be able to recharge the battery, if it's battery power, or power it directly from whatever systems we have. That is one place, power regeneration is one place where an armor brigade benefits over a mobile brigade because we have our organic platforms. But that is something the magazine depth and cost aspect of it is something that we're very cognizant of.

So the first cavalry division about a month and a half ago hosted Operation Golden Shield, which we think is complementary with what the Department of War is already doing. But how do we protect against, you know, unmanned systems, not just defensively, but on the move? And one of the things that the division is very focused on is the cost component of it. So, yeah, we want to be able to defeat everything, but not at an extraordinary cost. Whatever is most effective and most cost effective as well. And so we don't have that figured out yet, but there are some promising solutions that are on the horizon. they were going to be able to help us solve this problem.

One of the things that we had at the National Training Center was also quite expensive. And we're like, hey, we don't need an expensive piece of technology. We just need an effective piece of technology that does something similar. But there are still some gaps here. So one of the gaps that we experienced at the National Training Center was in our organic ability to detect. And this is, you know, we've we've communicated. communicated this to the army, but the unmanned capability that we have has to be able to match the tempo of an armored brigade. So it's one thing to do it in the defense where you're static and you're able to set up your sensors and radars and, you know, sort of, you know, things stationary.

And sure, you have to move it for force protection assets or not so it doesn't get destroyed by the enemy. But because you're in the defense, there's nothing other than the enemy forcing you to move it. Well, how do you do that on the move at the tempo of an armor brigade that's able to attack, you know, kilometers in an hour? It's certainly different. And so, for example, a first person viewer that has a range of one to five kilometers, great in the defense, great for a slower moving formation, not so great for an armor brigade on the attack. You don't have the ability right now to launch it from your vehicle, have it do what you need it to do, and then come back to your vehicle. So those are some of the things that we're working through right now.

And so I don't have a specific answer to question other than say it is something that we're keeping in mind and that we're working towards so that this is sustainable across the long term, not just for a number of days. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's essentially back to the value of an armor formation is how do you not let this conflict be protracted? you know, and the deterrence of an armor formation that is the only formation that can truly hold your center in both flanks at risk at the same time because of the ability of speed and firepower, you know, it is what we do. And that really hasn't changed.

You know, back from heavy cavalry days of Alexander the Great, like, how do you force them to defend both flanks, extend their lines, but somehow remain strong in your center? And the answer was they couldn't. And we're starting to see with the additions of technology that we've talked about that the armored formations are back to that tempo and back to that reach. I think that gets better as we continue to experiment in the army. And the value of the armored formation comes back to not letting that conflict be prolonged by letting us get into the same static attritional warfare that two mostly motorized infantry formations are facing each other right now in Ukraine. Let me ask you a question, just to ask you to speculate a bit about the future, even beyond the sort of, you know, next months and years and sort of the time frame that you're naturally thinking about as professionals. But, you know, let's think 20 years out if we can. I mean, the role of unmanned systems obviously is proliferating across the force. You see, I think, all kinds of interesting questions in the aviation context about how unmanned systems are going to be paired with smaller numbers of exquisite man systems.

you know, what is the role of unmanned in the armor context specifically? I mean, I could state it in a dramatic and blunt and sort of headline getting ways. Like, are we seeing drone tanks at some point? You know, like, how does that play out here in the years to come, do you think? Yeah, you know, I think there will be an increasing role as unmanned systems become more capable and more effective. So the issue right now is, as I said a little bit ago, the keeping up with the bait, the pace and the tempo of an armored brigade.

And so it would be great to have an unmanned system that can bound forward kilometers at a time and then be able to have the power generation that lasts that long and be able to actually achieve an effect of some sort. And the same thing, whether it's an air system or a ground system. That's one of the problems we currently have is the ability for, you know, the air system to have enough battery power to do what we needed to do before we got to bring it back to to recharge it. I do think there's room for unmanned ground systems to play a role in breaching complex obstacles. The 36th Engineer Brigade here, stationed here at Fort Hood, Texas, currently a Corps separate

brigade, but by the end of this year will be the First Cavalry Division's Engineer brigade and wearing the First Cavalry Division patch. They are experimenting and spearheading for the Third Armored Corps, what it is to have unmanned ground breaching assets. And so we're excited about the work that they're doing. Certainly aerial unmanned assets are already playing a big role and will continue to play a big role. And so I do think that there is probably a day on the horizon where unmanned fighting vehicles are going to play a greater role. How you employ that in your TTPs, I think, remains to be seen, right, whether that's the,

the main attacking force or a deception operation, I think both are valid, right? Or you can even think of a different way to do it. So I don't know what the exact answer is other than I. That technology as immatures will certainly play a role for sure. No, and I'm glad you cite the breaching stuff because that seems to be where if you're going to start with ground maneuver and you're going to ask yourself, where does unmanned make the most sense that for obvious reasons? and none of us would want to get blown up driving through a minefield.

It seems like the obvious place to start. No, no, I agree. And that's on the front lines. You also have, I think, a future where unmanned ground assets help you with casualty evacuation and resupply. And so your ability to use unmanned assets and you say, hey, from point A to the higher level of care back at the role two, I need you to, you know, program this in. and then it knows what route to take the casualties back. We at National Train Center did have some unmanned aerial resupply. This is really designed for dismounted forces,

but, you know, Cam and his battang were able to resupply some dismounted OPs with that to some success, I think. And so instead of having to send soldiers forward to resupply or bring them back, you know, I don't know, Cam, if you want to share your lessons learned there. Yeah, I think it's just that. I mean, I think we spend a lot of time talking about the lethality of unmanned systems. And to your point, how else are they going to be used in the future? I think industry is doing a pretty good job of giving us a suite of capabilities.

And this system that currently is referring to is just one of those things. Like here is this capability. How do you use it? And I think that's going to be the Army's problem going forward. There's so many capabilities that already exist. It's, you know, how do we? we how do we incorporate them, use them, update doctrine, you know, let, let smart people at all levels of the army just figure this problem out and then run with the solution. Yeah, you know,

I got to see, I'm just sticking with the, with unmanned casualty evacuation for second, I got to see these, you know, unmanned buggies essentially that they're using in Ukraine. I didn't see any actual casualties evacuated. I didn't see them in a training facility. And it's striking to me, you know, as a former infantryman, seeing this stuff. I'm curious if you thought about this. The very practical. problem that seemed obvious to me was, you know, you get hurt out there. No one's coming for you. One of these buggies is going to come for you. Um, is, uh, if you're just a little bit hurt, that's fine, because you can haul your ass up on that thing. Um, and it'll drive you out again in theory. If you're

badly hurt, though, I couldn't quite figure out. And I, and I think their effective answer the question was just basically a grim one that you're out of luck. Um, but you got to get yourself up on one of these things. I don't know if you guys have given any thought to this problem and and how that works. But it seemed like an obvious issue to me. Yeah, not too much thought yet. You know, certainly something that we care about

is the care of our troopers right there. How do we treat not only at the point of injury, but then be able to get our casualties back to a higher level of care? And, you know, one of the things is, you know, in a battlefield, hopefully you're never alone. And I can't guarantee that, right? At some point, somebody may find ourselves alone and unafraid, but if you have a battle buddy there or a squad that can be nearby,

and maybe you're too severely wounded, but hopefully your battle buddy is not, and then you're going to be able to help your battle buddy get loaded onto this thing. I mentioned earlier the prolonged care training that our medics received, and so because of, you know, you could say that the error of the golden hour is gone. They probably still exist in some cases and doesn't exist in other cases. And so we have to be able to execute prolonged care because until this buggy arrives or whatever it is that's coming for you arrives, we got to keep you alive. So that's one of the things that we've shared with the Medical Center of Excellence down in Joint Base San Antonio here in Texas and they're incorporated into their doctrine and into their training. Now do we get more medics trained to be able to execute prolonged care?

I think you're right. It is an issue that isn't 100% solved. But whether it's an unmanned system that's coming back to get you or a manned evacuation, that is something that were triage. Triage certainly matters. In this brigade, we incorporated a ground medevac control status in order to prioritize our assets. So we only have so many evacuation assets in the brigade. And so we took a look at how can we.

similar to, you know, the main effort gets weighted with more artillery as an example. How can we wait, whether it's a main effort or something else, with more evacuation assets, whether that's manned or unman? And so what we are working towards, right, and what we've shared with the Medical Center of Excellence is, hey, here's a concept. Here's what we operationalize at our level to be able to do then. So depending on the form of the type, an amount of enemy contact, where they were, you know, in a certain piece of terrain,

how far are they were from the brigade's role to an hour of surgeons at the brigade level, you know, can we give more assets to this battalion versus this battalion, prioritize this battalion because of, you know, the different conditions. I think it worked well. There's still some work to do. That's part of what helped, you know, 1-9 Cab and CAMM achieve that 96% survivability rate along with the training that the armedics had for prolonged care. But that's something that we endeavor to get better at.

And we want to make sure that we're sharing the lessons with the rest of the Army. Let me close with this sort of big picture question for you gentlemen. So if the concept for maneuver and just effectiveness in general at the division level now is just to sum up, combined arms at every echelon down to the company level and protection at every echelon. including air defense at every level down to the company level. And then the high quality training to make it actually work and solve practical problems such that when the day of battle comes, you're ready.

At levels above the brigade and division, if you had the opportunity to talk to people at the highest level of commander at a policy level, what do you need that you don't have that you would advise the Department of War, for example, to prioritize? guys. Yeah, we're lucky enough that the Department of the Army and the Department of War have given us a lot. You know, it's easy to say, hey, we don't have this and this yet.

But, you know, the Army and the Department of War are making some tough choices, right? So, like, I would love for every armored formation to, you know, like that, have a bunch of Pileo pieces of equipment because assured beyond line of site communications are going to changed the way we fight. It certainly changed for us. I was able to command and control the brigade from over 40 kilometers away, talk to one of my battan commanders on the front lines, and more easily synchronize the brigade's fight, which in the current era of towing big satellite dishes to talk to folks. I mean, that's not possible. But Pileo makes that possible. That's not a policy change, where we can, if the Army wanted to spend its money that way, you could buy every,

you know, every squad of Pileo system today. We got some, some hard choices to make, right? So I don't know that it's a policy level change that needs to happen, but I think what the, what we're doing right now where we give certain formations, different problem sets to solve is helpful so that we're not, you know, third infantry division isn't learning the same lessons, that first cavalry division, just learned or that fourth infantry division is about to learn, right? We're pretty open with each other. One, the Army has said, okay, you solve this, you solve this, you solve this, but then we're also sharing a bunch of lessons learned.

Are there some duplicative efforts? Yes, right? I'd be lying if I said there weren't. There are some, but there would be more duplicative efforts if, you know, if the Army didn't say, hey, this is what we need you to do. And so I think that, you know, what we would convey, if given the opportunity is combined arms at echelon, coupled with layered protection at echelon,

assured beyond line of site communications, unmanned, whether it's aerial or ground capability that can match the temple of the type of brigade that you are. So in our case, an armor brigade that can attack kilometers, many kilometers in a day. And then how essential the cavalry squadron remains today. So I didn't really touch on it, but the cavalry squadron that remains in an armored brigade is the most versatile formation, right? They can perform reconnaissance if needed, security operations, economy of force operations.

One of the things that we're proud of is how we fought that. So instead of, you know, typically what you'd seen is, you know, the cavalry squadron is split up and you say, hey, cavalry troop X, you're on the western side. Cavalry Troop Y, you're sort of somewhere in the middle. And cavalry troop Z, you're on the eastern side. and we've sort of spread out our cavalry forces. I fought them as a cavalry squadron. So able to conduct various types of missions, whether it's an advance guard,

seize a piece of key terrain, I do something else. Our multifunctional strike troop with different detection assets allowed us to do that. So I would convey the importance of the cavalry squadron what that brings to the fight because, you know, I think it brings a lot. And so, you know, as we continue to reflect on our time at the National Training Center,

you know, our time as a transformation and contact formation, those are the lessons that stand out. Certainly having the division as part of the fight is helpful, right? Brigades don't fight alone unless they absolutely have to. And so a combined arms team at Eschon is able to do that. Now, if we ever had to fight alone, we would, right? but that's not how we want to. We want to overwhelm the enemy. So that's what I would share.

Yeah, I think that we had a lot of success to the National Training Center because of equipment technologies. That was the piece of it. I would argue that our largest contributor success is that we were a well-trained organization. And what I would ask is we had a lot of support from the division, from the Army, from the Department of War that allowed us to train leading up to the National Training Center. And that was, you know, those initial repetitions that they let us kind of come up with these ideas, test equipment, give feedback that is probably the most perceptive from Army and department senior leaders that we've seen in our careers. They were there to listen and tend to solve problems.

So, you know, at Eschelon, I think continue to allow these formations to have rigorous training at home station and then go to the training centers well prepared and have a, you know, a real. fight, I think we'll continue to succeed. Colonel Jose Reyes and Lieutenant Colonel David Cam Smith, it's been a really, really interesting conversation. I'm grateful to you both for making the time. I congratulate you on your success out there at NTC, and then, of course, I'm praying that it leads to actual success on the battlefield should that day ever come.

Thank you so much, gentlemen, for all that you do. Yeah, thanks, sir. Yeah, thanks, Aaron. I appreciate your time.