U.S. Army Merges Drones and Electronic Warfare at Fort Stewart

The U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Division is training its Soldiers to fight in a world where a drone flying overhead and a jammer carried on your back are just as important as the rifle in your hands, as ARMY.MIL reported. During Raider Density, an intensive training event running April through May at Fort Stewart, Georgia, the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team is pushing UAS and electronic warfare integration all the way down to the company level — and the results show what multi-domain operations actually look like in practice.

This is not a pilot program. This is the Army training its formations to treat unmanned platforms and EW tools as standard equipment for junior Soldiers.

Drones at the Company Level

The core insight driving Raider Density is simple: put UAS assets where they can actually be used. Sgt. Ian Anglin, a UAS operator with 1st ABCT, put it plainly — keeping drones at the company level means they are accessible and ready at a moment’s notice, not sitting idle waiting for approval from higher up the chain.

Elements of 5th Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment have been demonstrating this during the exercise, operating C100 drones during reconnaissance lanes that challenge Soldiers to adapt quickly to a contested environment. Cavalry scouts are pairing traditional observation with quadcopter drones to identify targets, monitor movement, and call in direct or indirect fire missions before anyone boots hit the ground.

“Having UAS allows us to scout the battlefield before we’re out there,” Anglin said. “We can relay enemy positions and direct or indirect fire missions.”

That is the value proposition in two sentences. Real-time aerial intelligence, available at the squad level, changing what commanders know before they commit to a course of action.

The Electronic Warfare Layer

Drones alone are not the full picture. What makes the Raider Density approach distinctive is the pairing of UAS with electronic warfare tools — specifically the Terrestrial Layered System Manpack, or TLS Manpack. This is a dismounted, Soldier-carried system that combines signal intelligence and EW capabilities in a single package. In practical terms, that means a Soldier on foot can detect, intercept, and in some cases neutralize enemy drone signals while staying with the maneuver formation.

Sgt. Griffin Quimby, assigned to the 10th Brigade Engineer Battalion, explained why proximity matters: staying with the formation allows EW operators to get close enough to intercept enemy systems while maintaining security. The goal is not just to detect threats but to act on them fast enough to matter.

By combining UAS feeds with EW data, Soldiers get a cleaner picture of the electromagnetic environment. They can confirm targets, share real-time intelligence with adjacent elements, and compress the time between detection and action. That speed is the point.

Multi-Domain Operations at the Lowest Level

The doctrinal framework behind this is multi-domain operations, or MDO — the Army’s concept for synchronizing effects across land, air, cyber, and electromagnetic domains simultaneously. Raider Density is where that doctrine stops being a briefing and becomes a field problem.

What stands out is the Army’s deliberate push to put these capabilities in the hands of junior Soldiers rather than keeping them centralized at brigade or battalion. The message from leadership is direct: if the Army wants to counter enemy UAS and EW, it needs Soldiers who can innovate, not just follow procedures.

“If we want to be able to counter UAS and EW or improve our own EW capabilities, we’re going to have to allow the Soldiers to innovate,” Quimby said.

That is a significant cultural shift for a large institution. Giving a private first class authority to operate a jammer or launch a drone without multiple layers of approval requires trust — and training.

DroneXL’s Take

What this actually means: the U.S. Army is treating small drones and electronic warfare as infantry equipment, not specialty assets. The C100 at the company level is the same logic as giving every squad an AT4 — you put the capability where the fight is. The TLS Manpack takes it further, because now the same formation that has aerial eyes can also degrade the enemy’s ability to use their own drones.

This is the direct response to what the Army watched in Ukraine. Commercial drones and jury-rigged EW defeated expensive armor. The answer is not to buy more expensive armor. It is to field cheap, distributed, degradable capabilities at the lowest level and train every Soldier to use them.

Raider Density is the Army building that muscle. It is not glamorous. It is exactly what matters right now.

The Soldiers who come out of this exercise will have operated real systems under realistic pressure. That is how doctrine becomes instinct.

Photo credit: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Rakeem Carter