U.S. Army video meant to laud the service’s work on fielding small armed drones instead highlights just how much it and the rest of the U.S. military continue to lag behind global trends.
“Have you ever seen a drone drop a GRENADE?” a now-deleted post earlier today from the official U.S. Army account on X read. “Watch Soldiers from @7thATC [7th Army Training Command], the Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine [JMTG-U] and @173rdAbnBde [the 173rd Airborne Brigade] execute the Army’s first live-grenade drop from an unmanned aircraft system in Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany.”
The accompanying video, which continues to circulate online, as seen below, shows Army personnel loading standard M67 fragmentation hand grenades, as well as inert M69 practice types, onto small quadcopter-type drones fitted with purpose-built mechanisms for dropping them. The system is designed to pull out the safety pin on the unmodified grenade as it is released.
There is a deep disconnect between the very tone of the social media post, as well as what is seen in the video and the comments therein, and the global reality when it comes to small armed drones.
The answer to the “have you ever seen a drone drop a GRENADE?” is a resounding ‘yes’ for anyone who has watched this area of development over the past decade. ISIS terrorists very prominently began using exactly this capability during the Battle of Mosul in Iraq in 2016 and 2017, something TWZ noted at the time was a clear sign of things to come. We had predicted exactly this kind of application for commercially available drones for years prior.
