Senators urge DOD to explore specialized treatments for drone-specific injuries
Loitering munitions and first-person-view drones are emerging as top causes of death and bodily harm in modern military conflicts, senators warned Thursday.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing about the small drone industrial base, multiple lawmakers urged senior defense officials to explore ways to help the U.S. military adapt to drone-specific injury patterns — particularly as the Pentagon hustles to expand its arsenal of uncrewed aircraft and watercraft.
“Small unmanned aerial systems, or sUAS, have become a defining feature of warfare. As we sit here today, the United States is engaged in major combat operations against Iran. Over the past several days, American forces operating alongside Israel, have conducted thousands of strikes against Iran, including the deployment of hundreds of one-way attack drones. Iran has retaliated with strikes across the region, including its own drone attacks that have resulted in American casualties,” SASC ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said. “The data from Ukraine is even more sobering. More than half of all casualties on the battlefield are now attributed to UAS.”
As he suggested, six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers were killed and multiple others were injured in an Iranian drone strike on a tactical operations center in Kuwait on March 1.
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, noted that uncrewed platforms cause harm that can differ from the wounds that service members endured from improvised explosive devices that were widely deployed against American troops during the Global War on Terror.
“The Wounded Warrior Project has pointed out to me that drone injuries are different than IED injuries. They [typically affect] the head and upper body, as opposed to lower extremities,” King said. “I hope that that’s something that the department is looking at — about the nature of injuries and the training necessary.”
In response, Maj. Gen. Steven Marks, who serves as director of DOD’s Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), agreed that the department should look into this topic, and said that he’s personally interested in learning more.
“That is something that we’ve got to address as we continue to scale out these autonomous systems,” Marks said.
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., also encouraged Marks and the other witnesses to pursue research and other activities to get ahead of treating drone injuries.
“Last March, I was in Ukraine at a military hospital and I met with 10 Ukrainian service members who were severely injured. Nine out of 10 were injured by FPVs — so, first-person view drones — and the one that was not, was injured by a land mine that he thought was placed by a drone,” Kelly said. “So none of them were injured by artillery, even though that’s still on the battlefield.”
Noting that AI-enabled drones will likely “define warfare now for the rest of our lives,” Kelly asked about the autonomous capabilities of the Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) platforms that the U.S. military is deploying for the first time in real-world combat amid Operation Epic Fury.
“At this level of open hearing, I’m not able to go into great depth on what is inside of the LUCAS system, but I would be willing to get on your calendar, on the committee’s calendar, and provide you a classified briefing,” Marks said.
Kelly further asked about the validation processes and safeguard mechanisms that accompanied LUCAS’ introduction into the force. He emphasized that Congress has not yet set any clear statutory framework to guide and govern how AI can be used by the U.S. in lethal military operations.
“Before we rapidly scale up production and field more of these systems that have AI incorporated into their capability, we need a clear answer on this,” Kelly said. “At the moment, a drone identifies and confirms a target — whether or not a human has to make the final decision to strike the target, or can a system execute the engagement autonomously once it’s been activated — these are questions we haven’t yet dealt with here in Congress, and we need to.”
Officials who testified offered new information about the Defense Department’s ongoing efforts to help spur U.S. drone manufacturing and the military’s associated weapons arsenal to counteract China’s global dominance.
Marks said that any system DOD purchases must comply with the law of armed conflict.
“I am not sure that the law of armed conflict has dealt with this issue, so LOAC might not be exactly clear, and that’s why I think it’s up to us,” Kelly told fellow lawmakers, to “take this issue of humans-in-the-loop seriously and create the framework that DOD will apply to these systems with regards to their autonomous nature and the ability for a system to make a decision on targeting the enemy.”
