DoD must be more agile to counter the rise of drones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says
NewsMay 09, 2024
SOF WEEK 2024 -- TAMPA, Florida. The rapid evolution and usage of inexpensive uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) and surface vessels (USVs) on the battlefield exposes a need for the U.S. Department of Defense and the defense industrial base to be more agile and able to field capabilities quicker, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during his keynote at SOF Week.
"If you think about the character of war and how it has changed, if you think about what we're seeing in Ukraine but also what we're seeing in the Middle East on one-way UASs as well as uncrewed surface vessels and everything else, I think SOF has a role," he said.
He praised SOF as an entity that "tends to lean forward" and "challenge the status quo," adding that this mindset is something the rest of the DoD needs to emulate in order to counter these threats.
"We cannot continue the same approach we've had for the last 20 years ... against a more advanced threat or a threat that's actually evolved to using marine inexpensive capability," he said. "We've got to ... get capability in the hands of the warfighters much faster than we do today."
Brown said the challenge will be figuring out how to help industry be more agile and field those capabilities quickly. Ultimately, DoD wants to get to a point where operators tell industry, "this is it, go" and then build it as quickly as possible, he said.
