U.S. Marines Get Three Weeks On FPV Drones As Pentagon Volume Gap With China And Russia Widens

The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune has spent three weeks training pilots on first-person-view attack drones, with deployment imminent and adversaries already capable of producing millions of similar systems each year. The New York Times documented the training in a video published May 10, 2026, showing Marines with 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment running through Neros Archer drone procedures, attaching simulated warheads, and rehearsing engagement scripts under live conditions.

Corporal Noah Player, a member of the 24th MEU featured in the segment, told the Times he had never touched an FPV drone before this course. He could be deployed any day. “The first time I’ve ever touched or operated an F.P.V. drone was through this course. Prior to that, I had no experience whatsoever with it.“

The training compresses into weeks what Russia and Iran refined across years of active combat. It will be the first time Marines deploy with organic attack drone capabilities. Asked on camera whether the Corps was moving fast enough, Major Joseph Tortorici answered no.

24th MEU Drills On Neros Archer Ahead Of Imminent Deployment

The Times segment was filmed at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina. NYT senior video journalist Michael Anthony Adams stood next to an airborne FPV drone on camera, describing it as “essentially a modified quadcopter.” The 24th MEU completed its Marine Expeditionary Unit Exercise (MEUEX) in December 2025 and its Certification Exercise (CERTEX) through February 2026, putting the unit in the immediate window before deployment. The ground combat element is 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines.

The platform shown is the Neros Archer, an 8-inch quadcopter built in El Segundo, California. It weighs roughly 0.9 to 1.4 kg (2 to 3 pounds) empty, holds Blue UAS clearance, and is fully NDAA-compliant. The Marine Corps placed an approximately $17 million contract with Neros Technologies in November 2025 for around 8,000 Archer FPV drones with operator training across the Fleet Marine Force. That order is what sits behind the training the Times filmed.

The 22nd MEU was the first MEU to certify on FPV drones, in Puerto Rico in November 2025, under the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team. The 24th MEU’s training cycle is the next major MEU certification on public record. The cadence is tight because the standardized FPV training program itself only existed in November.

Three Weeks Versus Years Of Combat Iteration

The training compression is the sharpest tension in the segment. Pfc. Edmund Comire described the experience of seeing a person through an FPV feed before strike: “the most gut-wrenching feeling for me, though, is being able to see the faces and the people before they get hit with a F.P.V.”

Cpl. Aidan Young framed the calculation directly: “Killing someone with one of these, if I don’t do it to them, they’re going to do it to my boys.“

Russia has produced FPV drones at scale since 2023. Ukraine targeted 4.5 million FPV drones for production in 2025. Iran has supplied loitering munition designs that spread across the Middle East and surfaced in the March 2026 wave of Shahed-style attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan. Marines like Player are catching up to formations that have already burned through hundreds of thousands of training hours and live engagements.

Tortorici was asked on camera if the Corps was moving fast enough. “Are we moving fast enough? No. But I don’t think you can ever move fast enough.” He added the goal was to make Marines “a lethal competitor,” not the lethal incumbent.

The Production Gap Is Larger Than The Training Gap

The Times segment cited a Department of Defense goal of fielding tens of thousands of FPV drones by the end of 2026, set against China and Russia capable of producing millions per year. That framing matches the structural problem rooted in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” memorandum from July 10, 2025, which set the every-squad-equipped-by-end-of-2026 goal.

The Pentagon has expanded ambitions since. The Army announced plans to acquire at least 1 million drones over two to three years in November 2025. The Drone Dominance Program ran Phase I at Fort Benning in February 2026, targeting 340,000 small attack drones across combat units by the end of 2027. The FY27 Pentagon budget request earmarked $75 billion for drones and counter-drone systems, with $54.6 billion going to the Defense Autonomous Working Group.

Tortorici raised the volume question himself in the segment. “If you gave the Marine Corps millions of drones, all except thousands of them would be sitting on a shelf somewhere, because there’s not enough Marines to field them.” His answer reframed the constraint as operator throughput rather than only procurement. The real bottleneck is the human in the headset, not the drone in the box.

The Reporter Flew The Drone

Adams piloted an FPV drone himself during the segment. That detail is worth flagging. It is not common for a print video journalist to handle the weapon system on camera, and the Times’ choice to film Adams flying an Archer-class quadcopter was a deliberate editorial signal: this technology is reporter-accessible, low-skill-floor, and exactly as cheap as the Marines say it is.

Tortorici described the older capability gap on camera. Before FPVs, when the Corps put a small flying aircraft in the air, all it could do was look at things. There was no kinetic option, and no asset cheap enough that it did not need to be recovered. The Archer changes both equations. By comparison, the Times noted, America’s Gray Eagle and Reaper drones are the size of a school bus and cost millions per unit. An MQ-9 Reaper runs around $30 million. An Archer runs around $2,000.

DroneXL’s Take

This is the Hegseth memo arriving at a specific Marine unit on a specific deployment timeline. The 24th MEU is the operational manifestation of a directive signed July 10, 2025, that demanded every squad have low-cost expendable drones by the end of this year. The training compression is the cost of that ambition. Marines will deploy with three weeks of FPV time against Russian and Iranian operators with three years of it.

The volume framing in the Times segment was the most useful thing in it. Tens of thousands of U.S. drones by end-of-2026 against millions per year from China and Russia is not a peer competition, it is a production deficit being fielded as if it were closed. We covered the FY27 $75 billion Pentagon drone request three weeks ago, the Army’s million-drone plan in November 2025, and the Drone Dominance Program at Fort Benning in February. Each of those signals capacity coming online. None of them close the immediate gap a Marine deploying tomorrow walks into.

The Neros piece of this is the part that does work. The Archer is Blue UAS-cleared, NDAA-compliant, and shipping. We covered Neros’ first Purpose Built Attritable Systems delivery to the Army ahead of schedule and the Archer Block 2 launch in March, and the company’s fiber-optic Archer variant being tested by I MEF at Camp Pendleton in January. The 24th MEU’s training stack is built on a domestic supplier that exists, has product, and is hitting deadlines. That is genuinely different from where the Pentagon was eighteen months ago. The Marine Corps’ own HANX 3D-printed drone effort from the II MEF Innovation Campus shows the Corps is building organic supply alongside what it buys.

Watch the 24th MEU’s deployment announcement for whether FPV employment shows up in their first publicly disclosed engagement, and watch Marine Corps Attack Drone Team training cadence at Camp Lejeune to see whether the three-week window expands once the unit is in theater. Tortorici did not address whether the Corps will get enough Archer Block 2 thermal and night-camera variants to field alongside day cameras, and the Times did not ask. The answer matters because single-payload FPV fleets have struggled in Ukraine’s logistics and Israel’s urban operations alike.

The Marine Corps is doing the right things in the wrong order. The doctrine, the supplier, and the certification path all exist. The unit count, the operator pool, and the production volume do not. The 24th MEU will deploy with what it has. That is the honest read on a segment that mostly let Marines say it themselves.

Source: The New York Times.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.