The Pentagon recently marked a significant step forward in drone warfare and defense innovation by holding its very first “Top Drone” school for operators.

The event unfolded last month as a key component of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, widely known as T-REX.

This semiannual showcase, held at Camp Atterbury in Indiana, is designed to evaluate and validate prototypes that are meant to address urgent gaps across military services and combatant commands.

Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, who commands the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, offered insight into the purpose behind the Top Drone school.

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In an interview, he explained that the Department of War intends to host at least two of these specialized schools every year.

The overarching aim is to create opportunities for service members, industry partners, and academia to test out tactics, operational procedures, and drone capabilities within a controlled but realistic environment.

This approach not only enables participants to hone their skills but also helps the department to improve and validate its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry explained.

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Because the simulated environments mirror real-world scenarios, operators can practice navigating through challenging terrain and adversarial conditions, ensuring that the knowledge gained is immediately relevant to actual combat situations.

For its inaugural four-day run, the Top Drone school took place at the Muscatatuck Training Center, located just south of Camp Atterbury. The organizers designed the course to imitate an urban setting and focused heavily on maneuverability, endurance, and reconnaissance.

Two private companies, Vector and Code 19, were invited to fly their drones alongside representatives from the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and the Aviation Center of Excellence.

The mix included both untethered first-person view drones and fiber-optic-connected drones, adding variety and complexity to the exercises.

In addition, a separate trial took place at a different range within Camp Atterbury, where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team performed live fire demonstrations.

These activities helped to illustrate the breadth of drone applications and the importance of continuous training and testing in evolving combat environments.

Limeberry noted his admiration for how adeptly service members performed in the Top Drone event, especially in terms of navigation and target identification.

Looking ahead, he expressed a desire to see future events run over multiple weeks.

This would allow participants to further refine their tactics as they face increasingly sophisticated obstacles.

Plans are also underway to create a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury, one that will replicate a denser, more wooded environment.

“As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of electronic warfare jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said.

Therefore, each new iteration of Top Drone will strive to challenge participants with more intricate electronic warfare scenarios, ensuring that both the technology and the operators are ready for the realities of modern warfare.

The drive for “drone dominance” has become a top priority at the Pentagon, especially as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has outlined plans to not only field more drones but also to build the training and organizational infrastructure necessary for widespread adoption by 2027.

Top Drone is central to this effort, as was the broader T-REX event last month, which showcased a range of low-cost, expendable attack drones, as well as cutting-edge counter-drone technologies.

Over two weeks, T-REX featured assessments of 58 different technologies.

Some of these were sponsored by military services or combatant commands, while others were presented by private companies that had never before engaged with the Department of War but offered promising solutions for existing capability gaps.

Depending on the results, certain technologies will move forward into joint, rapid experimentation, while others will require additional development.

Limeberry emphasized the value of the T-REX program as a mechanism to identify the most appropriate innovation pathway for each new capability.

“The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he explained.

Currently, decisions regarding which technologies will enter the rapid experimentation phase are still pending. Limeberry expects that the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and reach a decision by the end of September.

Beyond the hands-on demonstrations, T-REX also included static displays from another 50 companies with emerging capabilities. While these prototypes are still in early development, they may be considered for future T-REX participation, expanding the pool of innovation for upcoming defense challenges.

“They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry noted.

With its combination of real-world testing, collaboration across industry and military, and an eye toward the future of warfare, the Pentagon’s Top Drone school stands out as a bold new chapter in drone operations and military readiness.

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