Why Your Gaming Skills Are the Military’s Most Wanted New Asset

The Army just held its first drone warfighter competition. The best pilots grew up with a controller. But one veteran wants you to know what happens after the goggles come off.

The Competition Nobody Expected to Look Like This

Gray skies over Huntsville, Alabama. Soldiers huddled under trees holding controllers that looked exactly like Nintendo Switch consoles. Or if you are more agressive, Steam Decks.

Drones slightly bigger than a shoebox whizzed through plywood cutouts, backflipped over shopping carts, slalomed through columns, and dodged a Humvee on an obstacle course while a pair of soldiers did their best ESPN impressions from a tent on the side, as USA TODAY reported.

Many drones sputtered into the ground before the first obstacle. Others crashed spectacularly against the walls.

This was the Army’s first-ever drone warfighter competition, held at the University of Alabama’s testing range in February. Over 200 soldiers competed. Some had touched a drone for the first time just months before.

Others had been flying for over a decade. One competitor flies drones for a package delivery company in civilian life. Another flew as a personal hobby for 13 years.

Most of them agreed on one thing when asked what separates the good pilots from the great ones: Gaming.

Maybe all this years I was just training to be drafted?

The Skill the Army Is Now Recruiting For

Col. Nicholas Ryan, the Army lead for the Huntsville competition and a member of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s drone dominance team, laid it out plainly. The Army is now asking recruits specific questions during hiring: Were you a good video gamer? Do you build drones in your basement? What made you passionate about this?

That is not a soft question. That is a job interview for modern warfare.

Sgt. Cory Koehn, 25, a member of the Army’s five-month-old dedicated drone team at Fort Rucker, said gamers pick up drone flying significantly faster than people who have never played. Spc. Evan De Silva, who flew his first drone just months before the competition, said certain video games get you pretty close to the real thing. Staff Sgt. Salilo Fano, competing with barely any sleep, said gaming helps with training a lot.

The connection between gaming and drone operation runs deeper than hand-eye coordination. Military controllers for weapons systems have been modeled on Xbox and PlayStation controllers for years.

The Army spent $10.1 million on gaming technology for training in the last fiscal year alone. The Pentagon and gaming industry, as one University of Notre Dame professor who studies gaming culture put it, use each other opportunistically. The military gets realism and recruiting pipeline. The industry gets access, credibility, and retired generals as advisors.

In Call of Duty, you earn a hunter-killer drone as a reward for six kills. In Huntsville last month, soldiers ran a mile through mud with drones strapped to their backs before launching them at simulated high-value targets. The line between the two worlds has never been thinner.

A Million Drones and the War Already Being Fought

The competition was not just a showcase. It was a recruiting event for a military in a full sprint.

The Army wants to buy one million drones by 2028. Current annual procurement sits at roughly 50,000. That gap tells you everything about where the urgency is coming from. Ukraine demonstrated what drone warfare looks like at scale. FPV drones have dominated that battlefield for four years. The U.S. watched. Now it is acting.

Weeks after the Huntsville competition, the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran on February 28.

U.S. Central Command used one-way attack drones in combat for the first time during the initial strike. The competition was not a rehearsal for some future conflict. It was preparation for one that had already started.

Ukraine has taken the gamification even further. Their military runs a bonus point system where drone operators earn points for confirmed kills that can be exchanged for new weapons on what is essentially an Amazon-style military marketplace. The psychology of that system deserves its own article. Maybe several.

What Happens When the Goggles Come Off

This is the part of the story most coverage skips.

Tanner Yackley flew drone combat missions for four years during the height of the War on Terror, operating from Las Vegas while conducting remote strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere. He averaged two hours of sleep a night.

He rewatched footage of drone kills dozens of times. He developed what he describes as nervous system fragmentation from always having a finger on the trigger. When he sought help from veterans’ doctors, they saw a desk worker and dismissed his PTSD.

He founded Remote Warrior, a mental health organization for drone pilots, because nobody else was doing it.

In 2012, at 19 years old, he watched a wife drag half her husband’s body across a courtyard through a drone feed. Thousands of miles away. In complete safety. Completely alone with what he saw.

That is what nobody is preparing these gamers for. Multiple studies confirm that drone crews suffer from intrusive thoughts, depression, relationship breakdowns, and moral injury at significant rates. The 2025 defense policy bill included a requirement for the Pentagon to study the mental health impact of drone warfare on operators. Yackley called it too little, too late.

The Army is right to recruit gamers. The reflexes are real. The spatial awareness transfers. The learning curve compresses dramatically. But Wayne Phelps, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who commanded a drone squadron and wrote a book on the psychology of drone warfare, made the most important point of all. Drone pilots understand they are using lethal force and taking human lives. They are not confused about what is real.

The question is what the institution does with that knowledge.

DroneXL’s Take

I have been flying drones since 2016. I have never pointed one at a human being. I never will.

But I think about this constantly. The same technology I use to shoot a sunrise is what a 19-year-old soldier uses to end a life from a trailer in Nevada. Same physics. Same joystick muscle memory. Completely different universe of consequence.

The gaming angle is real and the Army is smart to pursue it. I have seen it myself as an educator. The pilots who progress fastest almost always have gaming backgrounds. The spatial intuition, the ability to process a fast-moving frame, the comfort with failure and rapid retry. It transfers. Genuinely.

Here is the honest part. The Army is building a pipeline for drone warfare faster than it is building the infrastructure to support the humans inside that pipeline. A million drones by 2028. Great. How many therapists trained in remote warfare trauma does that budget include? How many transition programs for operators who watched things through a feed that they cannot unsee?

Tanner Yackley’s question deserves an answer before the next competition gets underway.

What happens when they flip the goggles up and go, “I just killed this guy?”

Nobody is preparing for that. And the drone era is not slowing down to wait.

Photo credit: USA TODAY, X.