Small UXS-Squad Teaming: Military Operational Use Cases

The proliferation of small unmanned systems (i.e., drones) being deployed at the squad or small unit level for military applications continues to increase (e.g., the use of both commercial and bespoke custom drones in the conflict in Ukraine has been a headlining story since the start of the conflict). The reliability and capabilities these low-cost platforms offer pose numerous potential benefits for squad level operations, particularly for Special Operations Forces (SOF). This paper and associated poster present a summary of current operational use cases for commercially available small unmanned systems based on feedback from a cohort of representative military end users. The purpose of this summary is to provide designers and developers of unmanned systems, payloads, autonomy, and other related capabilities with an operationally grounded set of use cases to better inform their efforts from the perspective of the users who must make the decision to rely on these technologies, noting that this population is typically one that is challenging to access.