The Army Killed Its Drone School While Buying More. Who's Learning to Fight? | Hardpoints

Mike and Neal open episode 63 with a contradiction that should worry anyone paying attention to how the Pentagon actually works: the Army stood up a unit in January with one job—fly to Kyiv, learn how Ukraine actually fights a drone war, and bring the lessons home. Eight months later, that unit—the Unmanned Assault Battalion under the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vicenza, Italy—is being folded back into a standard airborne infantry battalion. At the same time, Secretary Hegseth is ordering every Army division to field a thousand drones and canceling the 42-ton M10 Booker to help pay for it, while pushing to replace crewed attack helicopters with drone swarms. Mike and Neal spend the episode asking how both things can be true at once.

Mike lays out the case bluntly: this is not a resourcing problem, it's a leadership failure. The two generals who championed the drone unit and personally met with Ukrainian commanders have both since been pushed out. Mike compares it to how the Navy handled a similar crisis during Vietnam, when a small group of junior officers built Top Gun out of a trailer and rewrote air-to-air combat doctrine. His point: if the Army needs the airborne battalion back on its core mission, fine—but pull the fifteen best people out first and stand up a real center of excellence. Nobody is doing that.

Neal pushes back with a founder's read on the situation, drawing on his own experience running Airloom, an emerging energy company navigating fast-moving hardware cycles. He agrees the money side is smart: canceling a vehicle nobody wanted to fund a capability everybody needs is good instinct. But speed without doctrine is how you end up with expensive hardware and no idea how to fight with it, and Ukraine is proving that lesson gets rewritten daily, not annually. The two go deep on why doctrine matters as much as the hardware itself, using the Marine Corps' MAGTF model as the throughline: assets only work together because units train together and share doctrine, not because the equipment showed up on time.

Neal draws on his own year as a forward air controller in an infantry battalion, where nobody had been trained to fly the three drones they were issued, and all three were destroyed before ever reaching Iraq. That personal detail becomes the strongest argument in the episode for why handing drones to units without dedicated, trained operators is a recipe for wasted equipment and worse outcomes. The conversation also digs into the harder tradeoff nobody in the Pentagon seems to be resolving yet—whether attack helicopters can really be replaced by cheap drone swarms—with Neal defending the sheer massed firepower a helicopter brings to a ground fight in a way no drone currently matches. They also touch on the industrial side of this shift, referencing the Replicator initiative and the reality that the US is still only on track to produce a fraction of the drones it will eventually need, and that flexible, modular platforms—not the flashiest single drone—are what actually win production races.

Goods, Bads, and Others this week: Mike's good is a weekend with his nephew and in-laws; his bad is West Point firing its only climate scientist for stating basic climate science; and his other is the USS Abraham Lincoln finally getting a port call after a brutal deployment, landing in Pattaya, Thailand, which Mike does not expect to end quietly. Neal's good is a federal judge blocking an attempt to restrict mail-in voting through the Postal Service; his bad is a reported push to strip the USS Doris Miller name from a carrier still under construction; and his other is the catastrophic glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border, with the death toll climbing past five hundred and still rising.

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