As two soldiers at the 10th Mountain Division were preparing for a Middle East deployment, they knew troops in the region had been under frequent drone attacks from by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria. To help their unit prepare to face drone threats, they created a computer system to enhance their unit’s anti-drone training.
Dubbed the Randomized Enemy Action Contact Trainer, or ‘REACT’ the system spits out simulations of incoming drone, rocket or mortar attacks that soldiers have to react to during simulated battle drills.
“We have the muscle memory to do a whole lot of things like react to an ambush,” said 1st Lt. Samuel Strobel, 1st Battalion 87th Infantry Regiment. “Most soldiers don’t have the muscle memory to perform this communication and coordination. It’s tools that they haven’t performed in before.”
During the 2nd brigade’s last deployment, soldiers saw numerous UAS attacks and had between 30 seconds and two minutes to decide how to engage the drone. After training with the system, Strobel said, “when things do happen in real life, there’s no hesitancy or second guessing what they need to do or who should be doing what. And we don’t see news stories about one way UAS drones impacting due to confusion.”
In January, a drone strike by Iranian-backed militias on Tower 22 in Jordan, hit the base’s living quarters early in the morning while soldiers were still asleep, killing three Georgia Army Reserve soldiers and injuring more than 40 others. In February, the Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said that U.S. Central Command was assessing “how this drone was able to get through” and “how it was able to evade air defenses.” A formal review is underway but CENTCOM did not provide a potential release date.
Commander for Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. military’s counter-ISIS campaign in the region, Army Maj. Gen. Joel “JB” Vowell said that the attack revealed the need for more defenses against one-way drones at small U.S. and partner nation installations. “Where are we still holding risk that’s just unacceptable?,” Vowell told Task & Purpose.
REACT
The idea for REACT was borne out of the two soldiers’ experience during a 2022 deployment with the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Brigade Combat Team to Syria in support of counter-ISIS operations. The two soldiers were working as night owl captains and tasked with ensuring that company and battalion operation centers were prepared to handle coordination and communication for any incoming threats.
They practiced full base drills two or three times a month with people physically moving to bunkers and sounding alerts across the installation. And almost every night they practiced the drills on a smaller scale “because it still takes a lot of practice to get five or six people to operate as a team and not individually,” Strobel said.
The soldier duo noticed that leaders were “winging it off the top of their head,” putting together different drill scenarios, said 1st Lt. Mitchell Crowley, 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment.
“It was either very time intensive to prep, or was very off the cuff and wasn’t well organized,” he said.
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The soldiers designed and wrote the code for a program that runs on a desktop which creates “realistic stimulus” that units can fold into their regular training so defense drills can be “ready in detail, comprehensively, just at the click of a button,” Crowley said.
“With more complex drills like this, especially ones where you’re having to deal with staff with multiple echelons with rapid communication and coordination, that’s a lot more challenging to rehearse and practice regularly,” he added.
As the use of drones become commonplace in 21st century warfare, including in attacks against U.S. troops based in the Middle East, the Army is increasing its training, updating its standard operating procedures and getting more drones into the hands of its soldiers. What the Army is still working to improve, according to soldiers, are their reaction times. In April, 3rd Infantry Division soldiers at Fort Stewart practiced with drone swarms to prepare for an upcoming Combat Training Center rotation and a major part of the training was simply spotting the drones “through observables” like sound or sight.
Drones, Strobel said, are the hardest to train for because of the quick reaction time coupled with the tedious standard operating procedures that include deconflicting the air space and deciding how to engage the UAS based on if its an enemy or friendly drone. All of the steps involve communicating up the chain of command and making sure the right people have all of the necessary information.
“We wanted to make sure people were well prepared and knew exactly like, ‘These are the steps I need to do, These are the people I need to talk to’ – so they could do that efficiently in a short period of time,” Strobel said.
The duo designed the computer program using parameters from previous drone, rocket and mortar attacks on nine U.S. bases and outposts in Iraq and Syria as data for the system to create randomized scenarios.
“For example, when we’re having indirect fire attacks in Syria, a lot of the time they were coming from the same area and so for the setup for that particular area, there’s basically a box that we defined where the enemies would typically attack from in the program,” Crowley said.
For indirect fires, their parameters included launch location, level of accuracy and ordnance type for seven and 120 millimeter rocket attacks and theater ballistic missiles “because that’s what we were mostly experiencing during our previous deployment,” Crowley said. For UAS, the program has different categories: loitering, one-way attack or downed friendly drones and uses data points like launch locations, flight speed, and altitude.
The soldier pair passed along their tool to the Ohio National Guard, 37th Infantry Brigade Combat Team to train with before their deployments in 2022 and 2023 as well as their own 2nd Brigade Combat Team’s deployment in 2023.
“We did receive information that using REACT they felt much more prepared to deal with that than they would have,” Strobel said.
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