The Tactics, Integration and Employment Battery of the 5th Battalion, 4th Air Defense Artillery Regiment led the trials under Operation Audacious Fury. “There are a lot of systems that we can use to get after defeating the massed UAS threats while staying on the right side of the cost-curve, so we don’t expend our exquisite munitions ineffectively,” said Lt. Col. John Verwiel, the battalion commander.
The battery used the exercise to work out how soldiers should employ the FD-1 and how to train and certify operators who had never flown a first-person-view drone. “We came out here to develop the TTPs and our training tabling certification system to get an operator with no knowledge or skills in flying an FPV drone to become a skilled operator,” said Staff Sgt. Felix Aguilar, a platoon sergeant with the battery.
The Army expects soldiers from the battery to train and certify operators in other units across U.S. Army Europe and Africa as the training progresses. “What I want to do is standardize the training for it, standardize the engagement process, and then get it out to the force at scale to defeat that mass problem,” Verwiel said.
