Australia’s military drone pilots are internationally competitive, and the army is beginning to benefit from skills that service personnel are developing privately. Nonetheless, the Australian Defence Force is still a long way from fielding drone capability at the scale that modern warfare demands.
At the sixth Military International Drone Racing Tournament (MIDRT) in Sydney last week, the ADF team won the title for the sixth consecutive year, this time beating teams from Britain, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The tournament also introduced tactical exercises for the first time in Australia, simulating precision strike and aerial interception—tasks drawn directly from the war in Ukraine.
Many teams in the tournament consisted of active military personnel, each racing custom-built first-person view (FPV) drones on a timed course at Randwick Barracks. However, it was the tactical exercises that took place at a site near RAAF Richmond that signalled where the true value of all the skills honed through the sport lies for the defence community.
In one, pilots made a bullseye drop of a replica 60 mm mortar shell from a drone with 25 cm rotors.
In another, a four-person team used a drone with 18 cm rotors to conduct an aerial interception of a camouflaged fixed-wing reconnaissance aircraft flying an automated flight path.
While this is a hobby conducted by ADF members outside of their day jobs, these were not typical hobby exercises. The fixed-wing targets were painted to blend with the landscape and sky, and the intercept task required the pilot to fly blind from a tent, guided only by a spotter who relayed position and altitude over radio.
These private activities are only supplemental to Defence’s official effort at implementing widespread use of uncrewed systems in the ADF. But they look notably helpful.
Wing Commander Keirin Joyce, president of the ADF drone racing team, described how the skills developed through competitive FPV drone racing are highly translatable to tactical FPV drone scenarios—evident in the fact that several pilots on the ADF drone racing team, as Joyce says, ‘helped train the Australian Army’s 1st Armoured Regiment’s FPV strike team’ in Exercise Talisman Sabre last year.
The regiment, based at RAAF Edinburgh at Adelaide, transitioned to an experimental unit in late 2023, with the role of trialling new technologies, including drones and autonomous systems, as part of the army’s shift toward littoral manoeuvre—operations that exploit coastal and maritime terrain.
Additionally, most of the ADF drone pilots at the tournament said they built their racing drones from scratch—soldering, programming and assembling—meaning they are developing exactly the production skills that matter for drone forces, who often need to make last-minute repairs and adjustments to their systems in the field.
But the gap between a small community of highly skilled pilots, and the scale of drone warfare seen in modern conflicts such as Ukraine, where a claimed 9,000 FPV drones are being deployed daily, remains wide. For instance, drone pilots at the event said many essential components of FPV drones, including frames, motors and rotors, could be stockpiled, but that the electronics that connect them would become obsolete within a year. So, the ability to produce drones rapidly matters just as much, if not more, as warehousing them. However, the ADF has not yet reached the scale of production and storage that would be required to meet the demands of a modern conflict scenario.
Joyce, also deputy director of disruptive experimentation in the Royal Australian Air Force, said Australia is ‘doing well in terms of drone tech and training, and [has] the pilots and skills, but needs to scale it, massively’. Fortunately, there are signs, especially events including MIDRT, that indicate a positive trajectory of this scaling. The government has committed more than A$1.3 billion over the next decade to counter-drone capability under Project Land 156, and the army’s Battle Lab has emphasised FPV drone innovation as critical, recently producing 161 qualified FPV pilots through its training programs.
Additionally, the army is structurally adapting through units such as the 1st Armoured Regiment, and, according to personnel at the event, Australian drone pilots are working alongside and learning from battle-tested Ukrainian pilots on a regular basis.
What events such as MIDRT show is that the human capital already exists—Australia has a growing community of pilots, many of them young service members who taught themselves the pre-requisite skills to pilot a drone incidentally, through growing up using gaming consoles, and who might never have considered joining the ADF. These young pilots are now building crucial battlefield-relevant skills through competitions including MIDRT, as well as participation in the ADF drone racing team. The next step is for the ADF to ensure they develop the crucial drone capabilities that meet the evolving demands of modern conflict, which it seems to be on track to do.