FORT STEWART, Ga. — Spc. Lathan Thomley enlisted in the Army to become a cavalry scout. Now, he spends hours practicing on a laptop simulator before piloting drones over Fort Stewart’s training area.
Thomley is part of 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team’s Transformation in Contact initiative, or TIC, where junior soldiers on the ground are at the forefront of experimenting with new drone capabilities and helping to drive the direction of Army doctrine from the ground up.
In armored brigades built around tanks and heavy firepower, the approach reflects how lessons from Ukraine are pushing leaders to rethink how formations move and survive on a battlefield saturated with aerial surveillance.
Selected internally, soldiers at Fort Stewart say operators start on everyday computer simulation programs before transitioning to real flights.
“We really train on regular computers — it’s a little gaming app called Liftoff — and you fly drones on there,” Thomley said while demonstrating a small reconnaissance quadcopter’s capabilities on an unusually cool Georgia day. “From that, you learn how a drone moves and how you need to angle it to make it go a certain way.”
Liftoff is a commercially available drone flying simulator that allows all types of users to fly drones in first-person view. It can be purchased from Steam, a gaming platform that can be downloaded by soldiers and civilians alike.
First-person view lets a soldier watch and steer the drone as if they are flying on the front of it. Soldiers at Fort Stewart have been training to fly while wearing goggles, an immersive experience that can be disorienting and produce motion sickness.
“The controllers are inverted so it’s very confusing at first,” Thomley said.
If a user wants the drone to go up, they have to look down, and vice versa. Once a soldier masters flying in the simulation, they can practice piloting the real thing.
The approach marks a departure from the Army’s traditional training model, where new capabilities often move through formal schoolhouses and standardized programs before reaching operational units.
Under the TIC initiative, soldiers test technology first and shape how it is used before doctrine and acquisition catch up.
Selected brigades are given access to emerging innovations like drones, electronic warfare equipment and new communications devices.
Changes to drone capabilities within the brigade are informed through feedback from operators driving decisions about how equipment is used, how much equipment is fielded and how drones play into the armor-centric battle.
Unlike traditional weapons training, which follows a standardized Army progression, drone instruction is still evolving.
Thomley said he did not attend a formal drone school and that he volunteered to try out the brigade’s new capabilities when leadership presented the opportunity.
2ABCT, meanwhile, is part of the second TIC iteration, which is shifting the focus to Armor Brigade Combat Teams and division-level assets to apply lessons learned from Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The experimentation comes as Army leaders study how drones have drastically altered the battlefield overseas, where both sides use unmanned aerial vehicles to scout and strike.
“When you talk about looking at our adversaries across the world, everyone is watching the battles there in Ukraine,” said Col. Alexis Perez-Cruz, the brigade’s commander.
Perez-Cruz added that the Army — and the armor community — is consistently studying the conflict to see how new technology will change future wars, asking “How do we use our imagination to look at the future and be able to fight the way that we’re seeing it out there, and imagining how we will be able to fight in large-scale combat operations?”
For soldiers like Thomley, the shift is a new skill set layered onto a traditional cavalry mission — to spot and understand the battlefield before the enemy.
But instead of binoculars pressed into tired eyes peering out of a foxhole, that view increasingly comes from a camera mounted to a drone hovering hundreds of feet in the sky.
Eve Sampson is a reporter and former Army officer. She has covered conflict across the world, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press.
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