CAMP GRUBER TRAINING CENTER, Okla. - Soldiers assigned to the 45th Infantry Brigade took part in the first of a series of counter-unmanned aircraft exercises at Camp Gruber Training Center on June 12 and 13.

“We cannot plan missions anymore without taking into account the UAS threat,” said Col. Khalid Hussein, commander of the 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. “What we’re seeing now, it’s not just one or two platforms in the air. Now we’re talking about swarms, you’re talking about massing effects of drones.”

Unmanned aircraft systems, commonly referred to as drones or UAS, have been used in armed conflict for decades, but their use has rapidly advanced in recent years according to Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jacob Nelson, a UAS operations officer assigned to the 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

“Right now the innovation cycle is about three to six weeks,” Nelson said about the pace at which new drone tactics and countermeasures are fielded in combat zones across the globe. “It’s changing faster than we can get [tactics, training and procedures] on paper. It’s crucial to [our Soldiers’] survival to be able to react and deal with this.”

This exercise focused on Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 279th Infantry Regiment, 45th IBCT being forced to avoid, react to, and counter reconnaissance drones and first-person view drones deployed to harass them as they battled opposing force role players.

Hussein said he has two key training objectives for Soldiers of the 45th IBCT - lethality and survivability - and this exercise focuses on building his Soldiers’ ability to survive battlefields where drones have become a major threat.

“This exercise is focused on the survivability piece,” Hussein said. “This exercise is going to reveal our vulnerabilities… What are the effects of UAS on what we do and how we’ve been trained by doctrine.”

One key part of the exercise was giving the Soldiers, regardless of rank or position, the ability to create and test ways to either avoid or counter the drone threat.

“Leaders at every level have full latitude to make decisions and come up with new ideas and test things out while we’re out here,” Hussein said. “We’re looking at how do we adapt to the current threat environment and the Soldiers down to the lowest level - that’s where most of our ingenuity and innovation is going to come from. [Soldiers have] a wide range to experiment and test out what doesn’t work and what we need to change.”

The 45th IBCT and Oklahoma Army National Guard leadership will take the lessons learned from this exercise and apply them to future training, including a follow-up exercise to evaluate and refine those solutions.