Marines Working to Figure Out How to Sort Friendly and Enemy Drones

The Marine Corps is learning to fight with uncrewed aerial systems, and there’s a lot to figure out. One Marine Corps leader said the potential for confusion on cluttered future battlefields “haunts” his dreams.

“Knowing what’s good guys versus bad guys, knowing what to kill and not to kill,” that sort of thing “haunts my dreams,” Col. Sean Hoewing, the director of the Marine Corps’ Capabilities Development Directorate’s Aviation Combat Element, said last week at the big annual Modern Day Marine expo in Washington, DC.

The push to develop counter-UAS capabilities coincides with the service’s efforts to develop its offensive capabilities.

The service has established a new Attack Drone Team and aims to replicate it across the Corps, using competition to mimic the stressors of combat. It’s also set up UAS advisory councils to accelerate feedback from troops on the ground to senior leaders in the Pentagon who can field requests to industry partners.

Drones are quickly becoming a top priority, especially as the world watches what how drone warfare unfolds in Ukraine.

In future fights, Marines will need to be able to identify not only friendly or enemy UAS systems with lethal payloads but also systems like logistics resupply drones and maybe even casualty evacuation drones, which could create new concerns around the identification of medical UAS systems for wounded enemy combatants, which are protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Friendly and enemy identification of drones has become increasingly important in Ukraine, where one Ukrainian drone operator previously told Business Insider that it is not uncommon for troops to end up jamming everything nearby in a “cluttered battlespace.”

Combat footage from the front lines in Ukraine has highlighted the confusion that can quickly arise from drones. In the chaos of battle, it can be difficult to figure out which quadcopter is friendly and which may soon be dropping grenades overhead.

Col. Scott Cuomo, the commander of the service’s Weapons Training Battalion and the new Attack Drone Team, envisions a not-so-distant future for Marines in which UAS identification demands will force troops to drill down on strict airspace deconfliction procedures.

“Someone’s going to do the fires coordination, just like we’ve always done,” Cuomo said, referring to the practices of ensuring strikes from aircraft, artillery, or other weapons can occur without harming friendly forces. “So there’s a lot of just building on what we’ve done in the past,” he said.

What might that approach include in practice? When a Marine sends out a UAS with a payload on it, “you’re going to tell someone that you’re going to do that,” Cuomo said, referring to detailed fires coordination between infantry units and their command centers.

Friend-or-foe identification is far from the only challenge of battlefield drone operations. Both Ukraine and Russia have been forced to grapple with tremendous drone losses, not only to one-way attacks but also to electronic warfare.

A reluctance to squander too many UAS systems may add more complexity to UAS identification concerns. “We can’t necessarily take the approach that it’s okay if we lose 40% of our stuff,” Hoewing added. “That’s not going to work for the Marine Corps.”

Loss of equipment is anathema to Marines, who treat equipment accountability as an immovable tenet. That may contradict the lessons from Ukraine though, where cheap drones are considered expendable and used as individual rounds of ammunition.

There is a lot to sort out, but the only way Marines will be able to iron out the pains of such complicated UAS oversight will be more sets and reps, Cuomo said. “Just give it to the Marines, and then figure out the training.”