The US Army is getting enough drones, official says. Now, it needs to train enough operators.

Getting trained drone pilots down to the squadron level is the next step, an Army official said.

Photo courtesy of the 11th Airborne Division The US Army is buying lots of drones to meet its goals of spreading the systems across the service.

The next step is training enough pilots to operate them.

Army courses and programs, as well as shared soldier feedback, help prepare troops for drone operations.

US Army officials say the service has amassed enough small drones to spread them across its formations.

Now the challenge is training soldiers to use them.

"We fielded 10,000 drones " after the first phase of the Drone Dominance program, Col.

Gregory Merkl, the director of drone dominance for the Army, said on Thursday during a media roundtable.

"We're in the process of receiving another 30,000 drones currently," he shared.

"That is enough absolutely to get them down to every squad level." "Where we still have some work to do, candidly, is getting everybody trained at the appropriate level," he said.

"Right now, if you look across the force, you have that capability in every platoon.

We still have a little bit of work to do in terms of getting qualified pilots down to the squad level." The Army plans to field thousands of low-cost, one-way attack drones by next fiscal year and has held a series of events to select drone companies for advancement in evaluations called Gauntlets.

Last year, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo directing the overhaul of how the Pentagon buys and integrates small uncrewed aerial systems across the armed forces.

That line of effort led to Drone Dominance , an iterative development program investing $1 billion to purchase at least 200,000 drones through 2027.