SOCOM Says EW-Realistic Drone Training Is the Gap. Here's How to Close It Before the Ranges Are Built.

On April 28, 2026, Admiral Frank Bradley, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee about what he would do with more resources.

His first answer was more drones. His second was more training ranges — specifically, ranges capable of replicating the electronic warfare environment adversaries are actually using in contested operations. He described building that kind of realistic training infrastructure inside the United States as “difficult but not undoable. It just takes more money.”

The acknowledgment matters because it came from the commander responsible for the most operationally experienced UAS force in the American military. If SOCOM’s training ranges are not yet delivering EW-realistic UAS training at the fidelity required, the gap is almost certainly larger at the conventional force level — where the resources, doctrine, and institutional emphasis are still catching up.

The question for unit training officers is not whether the ranges will eventually be built. They will. The question is what operators can do in the meantime.

Why EW Realism Is the Critical Training Variable

FPV and small UAS training conducted in a clean RF environment produces operators who are proficient under conditions that do not exist in a near-peer fight.

The systems that adversaries are deploying to defeat small drones operate across the same frequency bands that FPV command links, video downlinks, and GPS receivers rely on. GPS spoofing, control link jamming, and video interference are not edge cases — they are standard adversary countermeasures. Operators who have not trained through those conditions will encounter them for the first time in an operational environment, which is the worst possible context for building proficiency.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Ukrainian operators — whose FPV doctrine the U.S. military has been systematically incorporating, including in the April 2026 Fort Bragg training with the 82nd Airborne — developed their tactics in a contested spectrum environment. Their employment techniques reflect constant adversary electronic pressure. American operators training exclusively in uncontested conditions are building a skill set that diverges from the operational reality the doctrine was designed for.

Admiral Bradley’s Senate testimony named this divergence explicitly. SOCOM wants training ranges that can replicate “the latest battlefield technology adversaries are using.” That means spectrum contention. That means GPS-denied navigation. That means operating when the link is degraded, not just when it is clean.

What Operators Can Build Now

Waiting for purpose-built EW training ranges to close the gap is not a training plan. The proficiency components that determine whether an operator succeeds in a degraded RF environment can be developed progressively through structured instruction — before a unit has access to a full-spectrum range complex.

RF awareness is the foundation. An operator who understands the spectrum their system operates in — which bands, what power levels, what interference sources degrade performance — is in a fundamentally different position than one who does not. RF awareness does not require a jamming range. It requires instruction on how RF propagation works, what the regulatory environment looks like, how to recognize degradation signatures, and how to adjust employment in response. That knowledge transfers directly to performance when jamming is present.

Tactical adaptation is trainable before it is tested. Operators who have learned to fly with visual reference when video is degraded, to maintain situational awareness when GPS is spoofed, and to execute mission completion procedures when the control link is interrupted are building the cognitive pattern recognition that determines performance under stress. Those are teachable skills. They do not require a contested range environment to introduce — they require structured scenarios and deliberate practice.

System-level understanding changes how operators respond to failure. Operators who built their own platforms understand failure modes in a way that operators who only fly completed systems do not. When something stops working mid-mission, the operator who knows what the component does and why it fails has response options. The operator who has only trained on operational use does not. This is one of the reasons the Army’s Fort Bragg FPV training explicitly included drone construction — not as a manufacturing exercise, but as a proficiency foundation.

Electronic warfare awareness creates tactical options. Understanding what an adversary’s spectrum disruption capability can and cannot do — what frequencies it affects, what distance limitations constrain it, what signature it produces in the RF environment — enables operators to make informed tactical decisions rather than reacting to degraded performance without context. That awareness is teachable.

The Doctrine Is Moving

SOCOM’s training gap acknowledgment arrives alongside formal Army doctrine revisions that are integrating drone employment and counter-drone tactics into force-wide training standards. FM 3-0, the Army’s capstone operations manual, is being updated. ATP 3-90.51 on tactical small UAS employment and ATP 3-01.81 on counter-small UAS techniques are both being revised at the Maneuver and Fires Centers of Excellence.

The doctrinal direction is clear: UAS operator proficiency and RF/EW awareness are becoming baseline expectations at the unit level, not specialized capabilities confined to dedicated formations. The units that build those competencies now will be ahead of the requirement when it becomes formal, rather than working to catch up under the pressure of a mandatory standard.

Admiral Bradley said the ranges will be built. The operators who are most prepared for them will be the ones who did not wait.

Forge and Flight Academy’s RF and electronic warfare curriculum addresses the training gap Admiral Bradley identified. FFR-201 Tactical RF Fundamentals for UAS Operators and FFR-301 Advanced Electronic Warfare for UAS Operations provide structured instruction on the spectrum environment, RF-based threat recognition, and operational adaptation under degraded conditions. Paired with FFF-401 Advanced FPV Systems Integration, these courses build the combined skill stack that near-peer operations require. Contact us to discuss scheduling for your unit or organization.