Army Flies DJI Mavic 3 During Live-Fire Exercise in Latvia

U.S. Army soldiers assigned to 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment flew DJI Mavic 3 drones for reconnaissance during a live-fire exercise in Selija, Latvia on April 29, 2026 as reported by DVIDS Hub.

The training integrated both offensive drone operations and counter-drone jamming in the same exercise, running the full offense-defense loop that defines modern small-unit combat.

What the Exercise Actually Looked Like

The 1-12 Cavalry soldiers began with a simulated vehicle infiltration into the training area before transitioning to a movement-to-contact squad attack, the kind of deliberate assault on a defended position that forms the backbone of infantry tactics.

At the objective rally point, squads deployed DJI Mavic 3 drones to scout enemy positions and collect intelligence before leaders pushed forward.

The aerial picture those drones provided changed how the platoon operated. “Essentially, you’re allowing the drone to isolate objectives and provide security that normally you’d have to send a security squad up to do,” said 1st Lt. Richard Thomas, the platoon leader.

Instead of physically exposing soldiers to clear an approach, the Mavic 3 did it from the air, delivering a real-time view of what was waiting on the other side.

From a separate position, a soldier operating a Titan V3 counter-UAS system jammed enemy drones attempting to enter the squad’s airspace, cutting off the opposing force’s aerial reconnaissance during contact.

Soldiers then established support-by-fire positions, suppressed enemy fire, and executed the assault. Drones fed the intelligence. The Titan killed the threat overhead. The infantry finished the job.

The DJI Mavic 3 on NATO’s Eastern Flank

The DJI Mavic 3 is a folding quadrotor weighing 1.97 lbs that fits in a backpack and deploys in under a minute. It flies for up to 46 minutes per battery and transmits live video up to 9.3 miles from the controller over DJI’s O3+ link.

The camera is a 4/3-inch CMOS Hasselblad sensor shooting 5.1K video, with omnidirectional obstacle sensing built in. It’s the same platform that Ukrainian forces have been using for front-line reconnaissance since the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war — and that adversarial forces have been shooting down ever since.

The fact that 1-12 Cavalry is flying DJI hardware on NATO’s eastern flank — in Latvia, sharing a border with both Russia and Belarus — is an editorial detail worth sitting with. Back home, DJI is on the FCC’s Covered List, its drones are banned from federal government procurement under the NDAA, and Congress has debated designating it a national security threat. In a Latvian field, U.S. soldiers are using a DJI Mavic 3 to clear objectives before assaulting enemy positions. The Army goes to war with the equipment that works, and the Mavic 3 works.

The Titan V3: Blocking the Other Side’s Eyes

The counter to DJI hardware on a contested battlefield isn’t another drone. It’s a system like the BlueHalo Titan V3, the man-portable RF detection and jamming platform that the other side of this exercise deployed to shut down enemy aerial reconnaissance during contact.

The Titan V3 — the MPV3 configuration in BlueHalo’s Titan family — operates across all major commercial and hobbyist RF control bands. It detects, classifies, and jams incoming drone signals using AI and machine learning to distinguish threat aircraft from friendly communications, applying escalating countermeasures that minimize collateral interference with blue-force radios and GPS.

The system is mission-capable in under two minutes and requires no signals expertise to operate, which matters when the soldier running it is also managing a support-by-fire position. The DoD has awarded BlueHalo multiple contracts for Titan systems, including a $4 million Army order and a separate $24 million DoD contract for the platform.

What the Latvia exercise demonstrated is that both tools — the DJI Mavic 3 for offense and the Titan for defense — now belong at squad level, not just at the battalion or brigade echelon where drone operations have traditionally lived.

Latvia, Atlantic Resolve, and Why This Training Matters

The 1-12 Cavalry is deployed to Europe under Operation Atlantic Resolve, the sustained U.S. presence mission that has kept American troops rotating through NATO’s eastern member states since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Latvia sits on the Baltic Sea, sharing borders with both Russia to the east and Belarus to the south. It’s not a theoretical threat axis — it’s one of the three NATO member states that Russian doctrine has historically described as exposed.

The training at Selija is designed to sharpen the skills that Ukraine has proven matter most at the small-unit level: integrating drone reconnaissance into the assault sequence, understanding how enemy C-UAS disrupts your own aerial picture, and building the habits to operate under contested airspace rather than assuming uncontested flight. “There’s always room to learn,” Thomas said. “Right now, drones and electronic warfare are a large thing.” That may be the understatement of the exercise.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ll be direct: the most interesting thing in this story isn’t the tactics or the training location. It’s the aircraft on the inventory list. U.S. Army soldiers on NATO’s eastern flank, training for the scenario most likely to resemble a peer conflict in Europe, are doing their drone reconnaissance with DJI Mavic 3s.

The same manufacturer that Congress has spent years debating banning from government use. The same hardware that Ukrainian and Russian forces are both flying in the war this exercise is specifically designed to prepare for.

The Army isn’t flying DJI hardware because it hasn’t heard the political arguments. It’s flying it because at the squad level, in a live-fire exercise in Latvia in April 2026, the Mavic 3 does the job. That’s not an endorsement of DJI’s supply chain or its data practices. It’s an acknowledgment that when readiness is on the line, performance wins.

The procurement debate in Washington and the operational reality in Selija are two very different conversations happening at the same time — and the soldiers in the field have already voted with their hands on the controller.

Photo credit: BlueHalo-Titan™-C-UAS, Pfc. Gabriel Martinez for the U.S. Army.