How a Team of Marines Built the Corps' FPV Drone Training Program from a Cold Start

**Ryan Evans** (0:10)
You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans and I'm the founder of War on the Rocks.
In October of last year, the Marine Corps had virtually no first person view attack drones. That's changed, and it's changed quickly. This episode is about how that happened. More specifically, it's about how a team of Marines at Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico went from a cold start to building a Marine Corps wide FPV drone training system. Their job is not just to train Marines how to fly drones, it's to create standards, certification, safety protocols, TTPs, and a repeatable training model that can scale across the entire service. Weapons Training Battalion under the command of Colonel Scott Cuomo has been the central hub where all this happens and where the trainers from the Marine Corps 7 regional training hubs are themselves trained. In this episode, I talk with the team behind that effort from enlisted to officer. We discuss how they learned from Ukraine, how they built a training pipeline from almost nothing, how they made choices on which drones to use, and energetics, a fancy word for things that explode, and so much more. Yes, this is a conversation about FPV drones, but it's also a conversation about the things many of us admire about the Marine Corps, how they move so quickly from recognition to experimentation to standards to scale.
But first, this episode is brought to you by Onebrief, which is transforming the future of the military staff. Work seamlessly across teams and tech stacks on plans. Go from hours to minutes in Onebrief. In the middle of this episode, I have a short chat with Grant Demery about the future of Onebrief. He is its founder and CEO, and its acquisition of the war gaming and simulations company Battle Road. Learn more about Onebrief at warontherocks.com/onebrief, that's O-N-E-B-R-I-E-F, warontherocks.com/onebrief.
Two housekeeping notes. One, on Quantico, there was some electromagnetic interference, so you're going to hear a little bit of static and noise at some small parts of the episode, and I apologize for that. And two, the opinions you are about to hear from these Marines are their own. They do not represent those of the Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US government, but in my opinion, their opinions are pretty good opinions. Enjoy the show.
Last time we spoke, we were really focused mostly on marksmanship, small arms training. Here, we're talking about first-person drones. Explain to me how your battalion made that evolution over the course of the last couple years.

**Scott Cuomo** (2:23)
First, Ryan, thank you, and Nicole, thank you for being here with the team. So I think it's good to start with marksmanship because it's kind of where our tasking came from. So for the listeners, we're in what we know of here as the Downrange Club, and it's really the home of Marine Corps marksmanship going back 125 years now. The Marine Corps at the turn of the 20th century was not anywhere near as proficient in small arms marksmanship as we are now. So our 9th Commandant created a shooting team and the first captain of the team. The annual best shooter in the Marine Corps gets an award, and it's called the Lockheimer Trophy. And this has been going on for well over a century. So if you rewind back to December of 2024, we had spoken a couple of months earlier on that podcast. That month in December of 2024, Ukraine employed somewhere around 54,000 first person view attack drones. And we were at a holiday party, sparing all the details. And we were at Lieutenant General Watson's holiday party. Major General Henderson, both of them had sat in this room a month earlier and kind of just like walked through this history. They essentially said, hey, we were not as good as we are today with shooting. A long time ago, the 9th Commandant created a shooting team. They figured out the best weapons, best training, went around the court, taught everybody, kind of in Belleau Wood, like history, like from there, destroying your adversary at 600 yards.
What do you think about creating a drone team to do the same thing? And then we went back and forth on what we call it. And we landed on attack drone because we needed.
So that started at that holiday party in the official tasking. I hold this with me often. I know you know CJ or Chris Chivers. On 3 January 2025, Chris published this article in The New York Times and the title was How Suicide Drones Transform the Frontlines in Ukraine. Major General Henderson was flipping through the article and he stopped on this inset.