When warfare pivots, doctrine and training sprint to catch up. The spike in first-person view kamikaze drones on the battlefields of Ukraine did not simply change tactics. It exposed a gap in how Western militaries train pilots, tacticians, and logisticians for low-cost, high-effect unmanned strike forces. Creating a Top Gun style school for attack drones is not a stunt. It is a practical response to a combat reality others have already lived through.
The Pentagon has already begun to institutionalize this lesson by folding a drone-focused school into its Technology Readiness Experimentation events and planned training at Camp Atterbury. That program is explicit about copying frontline techniques that proved decisive in Ukraine while testing them in red-versus-blue, threat-representative scenarios. The ambition is clear: teach small teams to integrate FPV strike systems as tactical weapons, not as hobbyist curiosities.
What should the curriculum look like? First, operators must be trained for electronic warfare degraded environments. One of the hardest lessons from Ukrainian combat has been how relentless and sophisticated jamming and spoofing can be. Vendor demos and benign test ranges will not approximate the electromagnetic chaos of a front line. The school must therefore include repeated, measured exposure to EW effects, both simulated and live, and teach graceful degradation strategies for navigation, control, and autonomy.
Second, simulator hours matter. FPV pilots who come from drone racing and gaming backgrounds bring muscle memory and situational awareness that translate into combat skill. Courses like the Army’s Robotics and Unmanned Systems Integration Course show how simulator time, combined with simulator-to-hardware transition training, accelerates operator proficiency and instructor development for partner forces. A Top Gun school should marry high-fidelity simulation with rapid, iterative live flights.
Third, teach attritable swarm employment as doctrine. Ukraine’s use of large numbers of inexpensive drones forces an opponent to expend scarce interceptors and attention on many small targets. That changes the calculus for commanders at company and battalion level. Training must move beyond single-operator strikes to tactics for orchestrating distributed launch plans, timing, deception, and replenishment under fire. Students must learn how to accept planned losses, mass effects, and how to sync unmanned fires with artillery, reconnaissance, and maneuver. Analytical wargames and live force-on-force sorties should reinforce these lessons.
Fourth, logistics and industrial hygiene cannot be an afterthought. The Ukraine conflict highlighted both the ability to improvise and the pain points of component supply chains. A school needs an embedded maintenance and manufacturing track. Operators must know how to repair, cannibalize, or 3D print critical parts in austere environments. They should also learn how supply constraints influence tactic selection and how to design kits for local sustainment.
Fifth, legal, ethical, and escalation training must be explicit. Low-cost strike drones lower the threshold for lethal effects. Graduates must be fluent in rules of engagement, target discrimination under sensor limits, proportionality considerations, and the geopolitical risks of exporting tactics. A school that glamorizes attritable warfare without rigorous legal and ethical framing would be doing more harm than good.
Operational integration is the sixth pillar. A Top Gun school cannot be a siloed testbed for drone pilots alone. It must run combined arms exercises that force air defenders, maneuver commanders, and intelligence officers to adapt. Counter-UAS crews should be frequent sparring partners. Command post exercises must include the friction of lost comms, delayed logistics, and contested airspace. That cross-pollination is how tactics migrate from novelty to doctrine.
There are real obstacles. U.S. regulatory limits around jamming and spectrum use make realistic EW testing hard on domestic ranges. Replicating the electromagnetic and sensor-degraded conditions of a contested front is expensive and politically sensitive. The Pentagon and regulators will need new guardrails to allow more realistic training without endangering civil infrastructure. Industry and ranges must build compartmentalized test cells where signal denial can be exercised safely.
Another constraint is supply chain dependence. Much of the small-drone ecosystem relies on commercial parts and electronics whose provenance traces back to global suppliers. Any school that tries to scale doctrine must couple tactics training with procurement strategies that reduce critical single points of failure and plan for component attrition. That is a national security conversation as much as it is a training one.
Finally, a Top Gun school for attack drones should not be a one-way import of Ukrainian tactics. It should be a bilateral learning hub. Ukrainian practitioners bring combat-proven improvisation and tactics that Western forces lack. Embedding Ukrainian observers and instructors in the school, and rotating Western students into Ukrainian training environments when politically possible, creates a feedback loop that polishes doctrine faster than any desk study could. The T-REX events and the summer training activities have already hinted at this model by inviting frontline veterans into experimentation spaces.
If we do this right, the school becomes more than a tricked-out range. It becomes a crucible where tactics, procurement, ethics, and industrial resilience are forged together. If we do it wrong, we will institutionalize bad habits: overreliance on attritable kits without sustainment, undertrained commanders who cannot integrate unmanned fires, and a cultural split between drone jockeys and combined-arms warfighters. The difference between those futures is training that is honest about the battlefield, honest about risk, and honest about what a cheap flying bomb really asks of a military that chooses to wield it.