The Army’s no. 2 civilian said Friday a proposal from the House Armed Services Committee to establish a Drone Corps within the service “could take away some focus” and might be counterproductive to moving out on new UAS and counter-drone initiatives.
“[The proposal] is animated, I think, by a recognition that this is a very real threat. It is a problem that the department and the Army, in particular, have to confront. And we…share that urgency and we definitely share that focus,” Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said during a Center for New American Security discussion. “My view is that creating a corps or other institutional kind of structures to get after it, in some ways, could take away some focus from some of the [drone-related initiatives] that we’ve just talked about that we’re actually doing.”
HASC’s draft of the next National Defense Authorization Act includes a provision directing the Army to establish a Drone Corps that would serve as the “command center” for drone and C-UAS activities, to include responsibility for programs and activities, research, development, and testing, specialized training, strategies and capabilities (Defense Daily, May 13).
Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces panel, at a hearing in early March suggested the Army consider a Drone Corps due to “the exponential growth of unmanned systems on the battlefield and the counter-unmanned systems that must be developed in tandem.”
“Unlocking the full potential of unmanned platforms for the Army will require soldiers to develop specialized skills and a deep understanding of various associated technologies,” Wittman said during a March 6 hearing. “A Drone Corps may better lend itself to allowing the broad array of expertise required to mature within the Army and for these systems’ unique capabilities to grow beyond their role primarily as enablers to the current combat arms branches.”
Camarillo on Friday said pursuing a Drone Corps-like effort “is not going to help [the Army] buy anything faster or get us more resources against this problem set.”
“I think the institutional implications of [the Army’s drone and C-UAS efforts] are secondary at this point as opposed to figuring out we’re going to employ the technology, what technology works the best and, most importantly, do we have our buying processes in place in order to be able to get there,” Camarillo said.
The draft HASC NDAA does support hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for Army procurement of counter-drone capabilities, which was included as the top priority on the service’s unfunded priorities list (Defense Daily, May 14).