Big Red One Tests OWS Drones for Anti-Armor Missions

Soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division’s engineer battalion at Fort Riley, Kansas, spent the last week of April launching one-way strike drones in a series of live experimentation events with a small defense contractor, as DVIDS reported.

The exercise has a name: the Diehard One-Way Strike Drone Experimentation Series. The mission concept it’s testing is blunt — hit armored vehicles from above, where their armor is thinnest.

Who Ran It and What They Were Testing

Delta Company, 1st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division conducted the Diehard series on April 27-28 in coordination with Argus Industrial, LLC, a defense company that specializes in kinetic payloads for unmanned systems. The event was documented by U.S. Army photographers and released through DVIDS on May 5.

The drone concept described in the official imagery is direct. According to the Army photo caption, the emerging unmanned aircraft system gives commanders the option to conduct a top-down attack against vulnerable areas in armored and light-armored vehicles.

That’s the weak-point targeting problem Ukraine has taught the world to take seriously. The top armor on most armored vehicles runs dramatically thinner than frontal protection, and a small drone diving vertically through that surface delivers a level of effect that would cost far more with traditional munitions.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Nathan Dvorak and Warrant Officer 1 Edgard Flores, both assigned to Delta Company, were photographed in consultation with Argus Industrial representatives to discuss the UAS concept, then led soldiers through flight path validation on April 28.

The Engineer Battalion Connection

The choice of unit is worth noting. One-way strike drone experimentation at Fort Riley has been growing since the 1st Infantry Division activated its new Launched Effects unit, Foxtrot Troop of the 1st Attack Battalion, 1st Combat Aviation Brigade, in January 2026. That activation focused on expanding the reach and survivability of attack aviation. The Diehard series sits in a different lane: it puts OWS drone capability inside an engineer battalion.

Engineer battalions handle mobility and counter-mobility tasks. Their traditional toolkit is breaching, obstacle emplacement, and route clearance. Adding an organic one-way strike drone capability to a unit whose primary job has never been direct fire gives armored brigade commanders a strike option that doesn’t depend on aviation availability or indirect fire coordination timelines. That’s a significant doctrinal shift, and Fort Riley appears to be working out how it actually functions in practice.

The 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team also redeployed to Fort Riley on April 14, just two weeks before the Diehard series began. That timing suggests the experimentation series was waiting for them, not improvised after their return.

The Broader Army Push

The Diehard series fits squarely inside the Army’s current drone acceleration posture. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Drone Dominance Program ran its Phase I evaluation at Fort Benning in February 2026, putting 25 vendors through a competitive fly-off to identify low-cost OWS platforms for rapid fielding.

In late February and early March, the U.S. military used LUCAS one-way attack drones in combat for the first time during Operation Epic Fury, targeting Iranian military infrastructure. That first-combat-use moment moved OWS drones from a capability under development to a proven combat tool almost simultaneously with units like Delta Company conducting their own ground-level experimentation.

Argus Industrial is a smaller player in that ecosystem. The company holds a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Cyberlux Corporation specifically focused on kinetic payloads for Group 1 unmanned systems.

Their involvement in a direct Army unit exercise at Fort Riley suggests they’re building operational experience alongside their development work, not waiting for a program of record to validate their concept.

What Ukraine Taught About Top-Down Strikes

The tactical logic behind the Diehard concept isn’t new. FPV drones diving onto the roof of Russian armored vehicles have become one of Ukraine’s most documented and effective anti-armor tactics.

Ukrainian drone operators have demonstrated repeatedly that a small, cheap drone striking vertically can disable or destroy vehicles that ground-based anti-armor weapons couldn’t reach, at a fraction of the cost. As of early 2026, Ukrainian commanders report that strike drones account for roughly 60 to 70 percent of all confirmed hits on Russian targets.

The U.S. Army is watching that number and adjusting. Every unit experimenting with OWS drones at Fort Riley is building the institutional muscle memory the Army needs to employ this class of weapon effectively before it matters in a peer-level conflict.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s the honest part: the engineer battalion context is the detail that separates this story from a routine drone exercise report. Putting one-way strike capability in a unit that traditionally clears routes and builds obstacles is the Army saying that every element of an armored brigade might need to deliver direct fires against armor in a future fight. That’s not a subtle signal.

The top-down attack rationale is also worth sitting with. Decades of armored vehicle development poured resources into frontal and side protection. The roof was always the afterthought, because it was hard to target from the ground.

One-way strike drones solved that geometry problem cheaply. The Army didn’t invent this idea. Ukraine showed it on live television for three years. Fort Riley is building the doctrine around it.

Argus Industrial is a company to watch in the Drone Dominance Program space. They showed up at a real unit exercise with what appears to be a fielded kinetic concept, not a slide deck. In the current acquisition environment, that’s how small vendors build credibility with operators.

Photo credit: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Chase Murray