Reimagining Paul Revere: Building Drone Brigades in the U.S. Army Reserve

Commentary by Benjamin Jensen

Published June 10, 2025

Next Army is a collaborative series by CSIS Futures Laband the Modern War Institute launched in honor of the U.S. Army's 250th birthday and the Army Transformation Initiative(ATI). The commentaries explore how emerging technologies, organizational reforms, and major shifts in the strategic environment will shape the force of 2040 and beyond.

In the future, the U.S. Army Reserve will call upon the spirit of Paul Revere-not on horseback, but in the form of unmanned systems. These drone brigades will conduct reconnaissance, strike targets, resupply isolated units, and protect power projection infrastructure. They will be citizen soldiers for a digital age, mixing tradition with transformation in contact.

Since the founding of the republic and Paul Revere's famed ride that sparked the raid on Fort William and Mary, citizen soldiers have played a critical role in defending American interests. In fact, Americans had militia charters and were a people numerous and armed, issuing letters of marquee well before the Declaration of Independence.

In the future, the U.S. Army Reserve will need to call on the best of tradition and field new unmanned brigades capable of missions ranging from intelligence collection to resupply, medical evacuation, and close combat-all missions performed by drones in Ukraine. In addition to the Reserve's focus on combat support and combat service support, it can add new unmanned combat arms formations that also provide low-cost test beds for experimentation. This model will align proven battlefield technology-multi-mission drones-with the enduring strategic function of the Reserve: scaling national power in a time of crisis.

Time for a Change: Transformation in Contact with Drone Formations

For over two decades, the U.S. Army Reserve has focused primarily on combat support and combat service support functions in an operational rather than strategic capacity: sustaining deployed forces in long counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns. While those missions remain important, the emerging character of war demands a shift.

Modern ground combat-from Ukraine's steppe to Taiwan's littorals-will be shaped by mass precision fires, autonomous drone swarms, electronic warfare, and AI-assisted targeting. The battlefield will be saturated with drones, loitering munitions, and sensor-shooter networks. Citizen soldiers will not just be medics and logisticians-they will be drone operators, cyber defenders, and algorithmic warfare specialists.

Much of this shift is on display in new drone battalions and brigades seen on the steppe battlefields in Ukraine. For example, consider the 414th Strike Brigade and evolution of the 59th Assault Brigade. In 2022, a Ukrainian businessman named Robert Brovdi-a modern-day Paul Revere-joined his nation's equivalent of the Reserve: the Territorial Defense Force. During the opening battles, Brovdi raised money to buy drones to support the fight. These actions paralleled similar activities by other groups made up of volunteers and reservists, such as Aerorozvidka.

Brovdi, who goes by the call sign Madyar (meaning "Hungarian"), grew this effort into a drone battalion in the 59th Mechanized Brigade, including service in Bakmut. In 2024, the unit was transferred from the Ukrainian Ground Forces to the Ukrainian Marine Corps and designated the 414th UAV Strike Brigade. By 2025, the remains of the 59th Mechanized Brigade were also turned into a new UAV assault unit assigned to the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces. In this capacity, the unit specializes in combining attack drones with tactical signals intelligence and electronic warfare to support both direct attacks and adjusting artillery fire.

This story is common across Ukrainian combat formations, which continue to adapt legacy force structure to field new drone formations. It is citizen soldiers who are carrying out drone warfare to break Russian combined arms armies in Ukraine using novel mixes of first-person view (FPV) drones alongside octocopter bombers named after a fairy tale witch, Baba Yaga. This rapid innovation can be contrasted with repeated challenges to field loitering munitions and drones in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.

Where the Army Reserve Is-and What Needs to Change

In the latest budget, the U.S. Army Reserve is slated to cut force structure, including Reserve Air Cavalry and Expeditionary Combat Aviation Brigades while canceling the activation of three reserve electromagnetic warfare companies. The Ukrainian model provides a perfect way to approach these plans. This force structure could be oriented to create new, occupational-specialty-immaterial test beds for unmanned system battalions and brigades.

The ongoing war, where drones are responsible for over 70 percent of casualties, shows that future fights will require the ability to rapidly surge unmanned formations. That makes the Reserve the perfect test bed. The new formations could experiment with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) drones in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit and the defense or defense-adjacent industry, while creating a model to turn any citizen into a drone-wielding Paul Revere of the future. By proving you can take anyone who wants to serve and make them a certified drone operator in less than the 39 training days allotted to each Reserve soldier, the force shifts back to its strategic role and supports wartime scalability and even deterrence.

What Needs to Happen: Build Drone Brigades, Scale Smart Detachments

To enable the next phase of Army transformation, the Reserve should build a pilot drone brigade. This brigade should be colocated with existing Reserve training areas and serve as a test bed both for new equipment and new approaches to training Reserve forces.

The experimental brigade would focus on training, operating, and maintaining a range of unmanned systems-from resupply drones to FPV strike systems and ISR platforms. The approach-as in Ukraine-would involve mixing signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities to maximize survivability and targeting. The force would maximize synthetic training environments, consistent with the Army Learning Concept, while also testing new approaches to Reserve service that break the "weekend a month" model to save training and travel costs.

Better still, the program could align with industry standards to create professional certifications for Army Reserve officers in high-demand fields like commercial drone operators and AI. The Federal Aviation Administration has a 96-hour commercial drone certification program. Incorporating this program into Reserve training would take up only 12 duty days out of 39 required by the current model. This combination means the U.S. Army Reserve could in theory save money on personnel costs while also providing opportunities for its citizen soldiers to upskill and make as much as $130,000 a year, the going rate for a certified drone operator.

The same logic applies to AI. Since drone units will collect large volumes of information at the tactical edge, they provide a test bed for narrow AI use cases based on off-the-shelf code. The formations could experiment with building simple imagery and signature recognition programs using techniques like "YOLO" and simple classifier neural nets. These skills can be taught using existing online course catalogues and built without significant hardware investments. In other words, the new drone brigade could also test how best to integrate tactical AI from the bottom up.

A New Call to Arms

Paul Revere rode through the night to signal the start of a revolution. Today, the call to arms is autonomous. As the character of war changes, so too must the character of the Reserve. The citizen soldier of the twenty-first century will not just carry a rifle or a wrench-they will carry a drone controller, use a terminal connected to battlefield data, and operate neural nets capable of parsing targeting information in real time.

The U.S. Army Reserve has long played a strategic role in scaling the force for large-scale combat operations. Now, it can take on a new mission: transforming in contact by building the drone-enabled formations required for future war. This shift isn't about novelty-it's about necessity. Ukraine's experience makes clear that drone formations are not boutique capabilities; they are the decisive edge in modern battle.

The time has come to stop debating whether drones and AI will change the battlefield. They already have. The question now is whether the Army will build the force to match. Creating pilot drone brigades in the Reserve would cost less, train more operators, and position the Army to out-cycle its adversaries when it matters most. As seen in Ukraine, these brigades could give form to a new generation of citizen soldiers.

Paul Revere rode to warn that the enemy was coming. The modern drone brigade will ensure they never arrive unchallenged.

Benjamin Jensen is director of the Futures Lab and a senior fellow for the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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