FORT STEWART, Ga. — Spc. Lyson Tomley enlisted in the Army as a cavalry scout. Now, he spends hours practicing on a laptop simulator and then flying a drone over the training area at Fort Stewart.
Tomley is part of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team’s Transformation Engagement (TIC) program, in which junior Soldiers on the ground are at the forefront of experimenting with new drone capabilities and helping drive the direction of Army doctrine from the ground up.
In armored brigades, which have tanks and heavy firepower at their core, the approach reflects how lessons from Ukraine have prompted leaders to rethink how formations move and survive on a battlefield filled with aerial surveillance.
Soldiers at Fort Stewart said operators are selected internally and begin performing daily computer simulation routines before transitioning to actual flights.
“We actually train on a regular computer — it’s a little gaming app called Liftoff — where you fly a drone,” Tomley said as he demonstrated the capabilities of the small reconnaissance quadcopter on an unusually cool day in Georgia. “From that, you can learn how the drone moves and how you angle it to make it go a certain way.”
Liftoff is a commercial drone flight simulator that allows all types of users to fly drones from a first-person perspective. It can be purchased from Steam, a downloadable gaming platform for soldiers and civilians alike.
The first-person view allows soldiers to view and fly the drone as if they were flying in front of it. Soldiers at Fort Stewart have been wearing goggles for flight training, an immersive experience that can cause disorientation and motion sickness.
“The controller was upside down, so it was very confusing at first,” Tomley said.
If the user wants the drone to go up, they have to look down, and vice versa. Once soldiers master the flight simulator, they can practice flying real aircraft.
This approach marks a departure from the Army’s traditional training model, in which new capabilities are typically transferred through formal schoolhouses and standardized programs before reaching combat units.
Under the TIC initiative, Soldiers first test the technology and determine how it will be used before proceeding to doctrine and acquisition.
Selected brigades have access to emerging innovations such as drones, electronic warfare equipment and new communications equipment.
Changes in brigade drone capabilities are informed by operator feedback, which drives decisions about how equipment is used, how much equipment is deployed, and how drones engage in armor-centric combat.
Unlike traditional weapons training, which follows the Army’s standardization process, drone instruction is still evolving.
Tomley said he did not attend formal drone school and volunteered to try out the brigade’s new capabilities when leadership offered the opportunity.
Meanwhile, 2ABCT is part of the second iteration of TIC, which shifts focus to armored brigade combat teams and division-level assets to draw lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The experiment comes as Army leaders study how drones could revolutionize battlefields overseas, with both sides using them for reconnaissance and strike.
“When you talk about our adversaries around the world, everyone is focused on the fighting in Ukraine,” said Col. Alexis Perez-Cruz, the brigade commander.
Pérez-Cruz added that the Army and Armor have been studying the conflict to understand how new technologies will change warfare in the future, asking: “How do we use our imagination to look into the future and be able to fight the way we see it and imagine how we will be able to fight in large-scale combat operations?”
For soldiers like Tomley, the transition is a new set of skills layered on top of the traditional cavalry mission – spotting and understanding the battlefield before the enemy.
But instead of peering through binoculars with tired eyes from foxholes, the view increasingly comes from cameras mounted on drones hovering hundreds of feet in the air.