101st Airborne’s wargame used 228 one-way drones; soldiers built about 150 themselves

The US Army’s drone “production line” showed up at Fort Polk in a form you can almost hear clattering: soldiers building their own one-way attack drones, not just assembling purchased systems. In the April rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, the 3rd Mobile Brigade Combat Team used 228 one-way attack drones, and roughly 150 of them were produced by soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division.

That “over half” number is the headline reality, and it matters because it turns a logistics problem into a maker problem. Col. Ryan Bell, combat commander of the 3rd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, explained that it takes a soldier a couple of hours to build a drone like the 101st’s A101, and a trained soldier can assemble one “in a couple of hours in an afternoon.” Bell also pointed out the bottleneck: “the longest piece of the process is the soldering and working the microchips.” In other words, the Army is not just buying drones. It is training teams to rapidly manufacture them locally, then iterate as mission needs change.

This is happening for a reason that shows up in combat lessons from Ukraine. The Army, like other services, is treating 3D printing as a quick solution for making spare drone parts and adapting drones to new mission requirements. Drawing lessons from Ukraine, US forces are learning the value of quickly building and customizing drones for specific missions, and then producing them in battlefield quantities. During the JRTC rotation, Army soldiers flew hundreds of different types of drones, using them for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and also for missions like taking out electronic warfare sensors and jammers, plus support roles for dangerous actions such as breaches. Drones extended the unit’s reach while keeping soldiers farther from the fight.

The Army’s approach is both procurement and production. The brigade bought a variety of drones for the exercise, but it also built many of its own. At the division’s home base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, soldiers manufacture drones in small batches, “a few hours at a time,” using parts from the Blue UAS (Uncrewed Aerial System) List, a marketplace of drones approved for use by the military and federal government. That detail is not trivia. It tells you the Army is trying to move fast without drifting into a regulatory free-for-all. It is using an approved parts ecosystem, then leveraging on-site assembly and printing to close the gap between what a mission needs and what arrives on a normal procurement timetable.

The A101 example makes the tradeoffs tangible. Bell described it as a small, homegrown drone costing about $750 to make, with the fuse, warhead, and airframe printed and built on-site. A 19-year-old soldier, once trained, can assemble one in a couple of hours. The microchips, again, are slower and likely represent the real constraint when you scale production. That means the “make it anywhere” promise of 3D printing is real, but not infinite. The near-term manufacturing advantage is strongest where the printed structure and mechanical components matter most, while the electronics supply chain remains a pacing item.

This soldier-level manufacturing push also changes where demand signals go. Bell said there is a strong demand signal for industry because of the large number of drones soldiers need, especially as they continue innovating different ways to use drones. When battlefield units can build quickly, they can also experiment quickly. That experimentation generates a feedback loop: new mission concepts create new requirements; new requirements increase the need for more parts and components; and industry gets pulled toward serving a high-throughput, distributed build model rather than a purely factory-and-ship model.

A practical example of that iteration showed up in a 3D-printed component the 101st developed to let drones drop hand grenades, with the design shared with other troops so they can make it themselves. That is the second-order effect executives should notice: sharing design improvements turns individual unit innovation into an Army-wide capability upgrade, compressing the time between a tactical idea and a fieldable change.

Put it together, and the strategic stakes look bigger than drones. If spare parts can be printed near the front line, logistics disruptions matter less, and adapting drones to enemy tactics or weaponry becomes faster. The executives, program leaders, and board members responsible for defense tech portfolios should read this as a shift in how “scalability” works. In a world where soldiers can assemble low-cost drones in hours and print critical structures on-site, the competitive advantage may hinge less on who can design the first prototype, and more on who can support rapid iteration with reliable components, training pipelines, and an approved parts supply that keeps units moving during exercises and, potentially, future fights.