‘Top Gun’ for drones: Pentagon plans August exercise with FPV drone units

WASHINGTON — With President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “unleashing American drone dominance” in both civil and military aviation, the Pentagon is taking a Biden-era experimentation program and turning up the heat with Top Gun-style air combat training for FPV operators.

“Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” Hegseth told reporters in the Pentagon courtyard at a “drone day” exhibition of new, domestically built unmanned systems.

“Our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones each year,” Hegseth said. But, he warned, the US military and defense industry were well behind. “We will speed up the timeline of rapid innovation. We have to, on behalf of our warfighters.”

One of the surprising innovations in Ukraine has been the recent rise of first-person view (FPV) drones, controlled by wearing a virtual reality headset that lets the operator see through the drone’s front-mounted sensors as if they were onboard themselves. Originally built for recreational drone races, FPV drones have been adapted by both sides to serve as low-cost precision-guided missiles. While notoriously tricky to control, these armed FPVs have proven remarkably effective on the battlefield — if the operator has the reflexes and the training to handle them.

“As part of drone dominance … the services are now standing up FPV drone schools and drone capabilities,” said Alex Lovett, a veteran official in the Pentagon’s research and engineering undersecretariat, speaking to reporters after Hegseth’s remarks. Next month, as part of a semiannual experimental wargame known as Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX), the Pentagon will be bringing some of those young FPV jockeys together for intensive air combat training, including against cutting-edge anti-drone defenses.

“At this next T-REX, we’ll be starting to host TOPGUN school,” said Lovett, referring to the famous Navy training program for promising fighter pilots. “We’re going to start playing Red versus Blue, their best coming after our best defenses. … This August will be the first time.”

These high-speed head-to-head wargames fit into the larger plan for August’s T-REX 25-2 exercise, which will spend a lot of time on “counter-UAS and short-range air defenses … both in an urban setting as well as across the base,” Lovett explained.

The exercise will test not only individual offensive and defensive systems but the software, networks, and command structures coordinating them — including both human operators and artificial intelligence. The military concept is called the “passive and multi-spectral air-surveillance kill chain,” explained Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, who runs the T-REX experiments at Camp Atterbury, Ind. (While he didn’t unpack the terminology, “passive” in this context usually refers to sensors that don’t actively emit energy, which usually means they have shorter range than “active” sensors but don’t give away their own position; “multi-spectral” implies a mix of different sensors picking up different things, such as acoustic, infra-red, and radar, and the using software to merge all the disparate data into one coherent picture.)

There’s a big emphasis on “low-cost, short-range air defense” right now, Limeberry told reporters, and on “low-cost, attritable” systems of all kinds: “That’s what T-REX is getting after.”

Limeberry’s team field-tests new technology at DoD ranges on a rolling basis every 30 days, with the larger, more complex, and more demanding T-REX exercises occurring every six months. It also shares promising technology with the military’s four-star Combatant Commands (COCOMs), particularly Indo-Pacific Command, which run them through their own field tests and experiments.

The whole process is open to a wide range of companies, officials said. They range from small firms like Berry Aviation, a long-time DoD contractor that produced the portable “Iron Weasel” drone on display at the Pentagon, to giants like Amazon, whose AWS branch sucked up masses of data from one T-REX and then provided analysis to DoD.

“We simulate an operational environment; they can come test under conditions [that] they would face in the field,” said Emil Michael, a former Uber executive recently confirmed as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. “[It] allows a lot of commercial partners to apply and be included, and that makes it a wide aperture for industry to participate. [We] lower the barriers, invite more people in, do experimentation.”

Some of the vendors find their products just don’t work as advertised when given to real soldiers and tested under realistic conditions, officials explained, which provides irreplaceable feedback for improvements (or, sometimes, an exit from the defense business). Other products progress through a roughly two-year process of testing, evaluation, experimentation, and refinement under the research and engineering undersecretariat, before finally “graduating” from T-REX and being handed over to one of the armed services to procure and deploy.

All 18 of the unmanned systems on display at the Pentagon Wednesday came through the process in 18 months or less, Michael told reporters, cutting years off typical development time. One prominent graduate is the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie, which is now being procured by the Marine Corps.

The rapid-fire experimentation-to-procurement pipeline began as the brainchild of Michael’s predecessor as undersecretary of research and engineering, defense acquisition veteran Heidi Shyu. In 2021, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced what she and Shyu named the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER, pronounced “raider”). The program faced some intense criticism and a Senate push to slash funding, and the 2026 budget request includes no funding explicitly labeled as RDER — but only, Lovett explained, because RDER is no longer a pilot program but the default approach across the research and engineering undersecretariat.

“It’s been institutionalized now,” Lovett said. “ Now that is the way we do business, so we don’t specifically called it ‘RDER’ anymore. We just call it rapid prototyping and experimentation.”