(NewsNation) — The U.S. Army has opened a school to teach American troops how to defend against drones.
The new university was created in response to the surge of drone warfare, which officials say has changed the nature of war.
The Joint Counter Small Unmanned Aircraft University has about 1,000 trainees in it right now. Soldiers are learning how to defend against them in modern conflicts.
The Pentagon wants soldiers to stay ahead of the fast-changing drone technology, especially after seeing how effective they have been on the battlefield in Ukraine and Israel.
“We’ve seen them used in a variety of capacities around the world, and I think the army is probably wise to try to educate their soldiers on how to deal with this threat,” Bradley Wilson, a senior information scientist for Rand Corporation, said.
The U.S. has been the longtime leader in drone technology, but with drones becoming smaller and cheaper — costing as low as $50 — nearly anyone can turn them into weapons.
“People are duct taping grenades to them to use them as a weapon. We’ve seen them used on our borders as surveillance systems to monitor movements of people and vehicles,” Wilson said.
“The drone club is getting larger and larger. We’ve got to make sure that the super advanced drone community remains an exclusive one,” Arash Aramesh, a national security and foreign policy analyst, said.
As versatile and cheap as drones are, there are still limitations to what they can do; including how long they can fly remotely and in what kind of terrains.
Most importantly, humans still need to interpret what a drone encounters.
“It’s almost impossible, no matter how far and how much technology advances, to substitute for the actual value of human assets on the ground. Human intelligence and human assets, both in terms of actual intelligence officers feeding you information,” Aramesh said.
Sometimes it is just as simple as keeping our men and women in uniform safer by sending in drones to check out a threat instead of boots on the ground.
NewsNation reached out to the Pentagon for more information about their unmanned aerial systems university, but has not heard back yet.