NC Guard and UK Forces Train Together on Drone Integration

On April 15, 2026, North Carolina National Guard soldiers and airmen conducted a joint unmanned aerial systems exercise alongside the British Army’s 101st Royal Regiment of Artillery in New London, North Carolina, as the ARMY website reported.

The training was part of a broader Patriot Training series focused on combat readiness, and it brought together units spanning field artillery, infantry, special forces, aviation, and air support under one operational roof. The explicit goal: get better at integrating drones into real tactical decisions, faster.

On the surface, this reads like a routine bilateral training event. It is not. This exercise is happening at a moment when NATO’s relationship with UAV warfare is under an uncomfortable spotlight, and the fact that the British Army specifically sent an artillery regiment to practice UAS integration with American forces tells you something about where military planners think the threat is coming from.

What Happened in New London

The exercise brought together personnel from the 5-113th Field Artillery, 1-119 Infantry Regiment, Bravo Company 3rd Battalion 20th Special Forces Group, the 118th Air Support Operations Squadron, the 449th Combat Aviation Brigade, and several support elements. That is a deliberately cross-functional list.

The point was not to have UAV operators train UAV operators. It was to force combined arms units to work with aerial intelligence in real time and make decisions under that pressure.

The quotes from participants are unusually direct for a military press release. “Drones are very effective at both observing and then delivering effective munitions against the weapons system that we operate,” said Captain Matt Murtagh, alpha battery commander of the 5-113th Field Artillery. “Knowing how they work is how you learn to defeat them and countermeasures against them. The better you learn the system, the better you counteract that.”

That is an artillery officer acknowledging that his own weapons systems are primary drone targets. He is not talking about drone offense. He is talking about surviving a UAV-saturated battlefield. That framing matters.

The British Army’s UAS Modernization Push

The 101st Royal Regiment of Artillery’s presence here connects to a larger British effort to catch up on UAV capability. Under the UK’s Project TIQUILA, Initial Operating Capability for the fixed-wing Eagle drone was declared in spring 2025, when three detachments from 42 Battery, 32 Regiment Royal Artillery completed their training in the United States.

The exercise used Skydio X10s, the American-made autonomous UAS that has become one of the most widely adopted military reconnaissance platforms at the small unit level. The Skydio X10 is built around a fully autonomous flight system with 360-degree obstacle avoidance, making it operable by soldiers with minimal training time — exactly the profile you want when the goal is integrating ISR into combined arms units that are not dedicated drone operators.

These are not high-end strategic systems. They are infantry-portable reconnaissance tools designed for the exact kind of small-unit, real-time intelligence work that this North Carolina exercise was practicing.

The British Army’s previous ISR drone, the Watchkeeper, was retired from service by March 2025 after what could charitably be described as a difficult operational history. The gap between retirement and new capability fielding is the window where joint training with American forces becomes most critical.

Why Ukraine Changed Everything

The tactical backdrop to this exercise cannot be separated from what has happened in Ukraine since 2022. Commanders have attributed 70 to 80 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties to UAV use, and Ukraine increased its strike success rate from 30 percent in 2022 to 70 percent in 2024 by compensating for reduced accuracy with a larger number of systems.

NATO noticed. During Exercise Hedgehog 2025 in Estonia, a small cadre of Ukrainian UAV operators acting as opposing forces reportedly inflicted severe simulated losses on a NATO formation, destroying approximately 20 armored vehicles in the course of a single day. The lesson was pointed: Ukrainian participants employed tactics adapted for the modern UAV-saturated battlefield, while NATO forces had not been forced by the realities of war to do the same.

The alliance is now scrambling to close that gap. Ukraine has sent military advisers to Germany to teach drone warfare, counter-UAS tactics, and electronic warfare integration — subjects NATO armies have studied in doctrine but never tested under persistent combat conditions.

NATO is increasingly integrating Ukrainian UAV operators into its military exercises to replicate battlefield conditions shaped by the war, with the alliance’s top military official noting that Ukrainian personnel are regularly tasked with simulating drone attacks against allied units during training.

The NC Guard and 101st Royal Artillery exercise fits directly into this pattern. It is the US-UK version of the same urgent retraining push happening across the alliance.

DroneXL’s Take

Here is the part the press release will never say out loud: this training exists because NATO, including the United States, went into this decade unprepared for UAV-saturated warfare, and everyone knows it.

The Hedgehog 2025 exercise result was an embarrassment dressed up as a lesson learned. A handful of Ukrainian operators with commercial-grade FPV drones simulated the destruction of a NATO mechanized formation in half a day. NATO defense circles have shown the effects of inertia and apprehension when faced with adapting to Ukraine’s fast-moving and decentralized research, development, procurement, and production structures.

The NC Guard and British Army training in New London is a sincere effort to address that. But it is also one day of exercises in rural North Carolina.

Joint training events between National Guard units and British artillery regiments are valuable, but they are not the same as the kind of institutional, doctrine-level transformation that UAV warfare actually demands.

Ukraine’s drone expertise originated in a highly decentralized manner, with civilian-run UAV schools, brigade-level procurement, ad hoc workshops, and volunteer units operating independently — not as outliers, but as the norm. NATO’s response has been structured training exercises scheduled months in advance.

Hundreds of drone variants cycled through combat testing and obsolescence in Ukraine in weeks, sometimes days, as Russian countermeasures drove continuous redesign. No scheduled bilateral exercise replicates that tempo. What the NC Guard and the 101st Royal Artillery trained on April 15 may already be partially outdated by the time those soldiers deploy.

That is not a criticism of the soldiers or the exercise. It is a structural problem with how NATO-standard military organizations absorb and apply lessons from a conflict that moves faster than their procurement and doctrine cycles. The training is necessary. It is just not sufficient.

Photo credit: 2nd Lt. Bridget Pittman-Blackwell