ORCHARD COMBAT TRAINING CENTER, Idaho — A heavy-lift drone climbed into 25 mph gusts above the high desert June 22, carrying a live Bangalore torpedo toward a wire obstacle.
For combat engineers, breaching that kind of obstacle is one of the most dangerous missions on the battlefield. Army doctrine accounts for that risk with a 50 percent casualty planning factor for a deliberate breach.
This time, no Soldier had to sprint forward to place the charge.
Soldiers from Bravo Company, 741st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Oregon Army National Guard, used a drone-delivered Bangalore torpedo to breach the wire obstacle on Range 22. The drone released the charge, shock tube unspooled behind it and the Soldiers took cover before the Bangalore detonated, opening a lane through the wire.
The proof of concept marked the close of a months-long innovation effort by the 741st BEB’s drone working group. Battalion commander Lt. Col. Eric Zimmerman established the group with a directive to defeat a wire obstacle using a commercial off-the-shelf or similar drone during the battalion’s annual training. The working group’s research found no precedent for the tactic in the U.S. Army.
“Mostly Ukraine,” Zimmerman said when asked what drove the concept. “Watching what was going on in Ukraine, and how innovative they are, it inspires you to get better and think bigger.”
The doctrinal cost of a breach added urgency to the effort.
“The most casualty-producing thing that Army engineers do is the breach,” said 1st Lt. Andrew Lucas, who co-led the working group from the battalion S-3 operations section. “Expect 50 percent casualties. If you can deliver something to clear the breach with a $40,000 drone, instead of putting Soldiers in harm’s way, that’s worth experimenting with.”
Innovation surrounded by doctrine
Zimmerman said his intent was to apply emerging technology to a problem engineers already know how to solve.
“I want us to talk about drones around something we already do really well, which is defeating obstacles,” he said. “So let’s do this non-doctrinal thing, but surround it with doctrine.”
The working group was led by Lucas and Capt. Samuel Cushing, the battalion’s plans officer, with input from senior noncommissioned officers, including 1st Sgt. Joshua Martin. The team first studied commercially available drones priced from $2,000 to $40,000.
After funding for a commercial purchase did not come through, the team turned to the Oregon Army National Guard’s 249th Regional Training Institute. The RTI’s existing drone-build program could not produce an airframe with the lift capacity required by the mission. Lt. Col. Mark Timmons, the 249th RTI commander, told the working group his program could not meet the requirement within the available timeline.
Rather than abandon the effort, the battalion operations section continued pursuing alternatives. Working from specifications developed by the drone working group, Maj. Harvey, the battalion S-3, and Martin, the battalion operations noncommissioned officer, vetted industry partners before determining Lorica Technologies could meet the requirement.
When Lucas arrived for annual training, he believed the search had come up short.
“We’d been told no, it’s not going to happen, we’re not going to get a drone,” he said. “And that’s when Maj. Harvey said, ‘Oh, we actually got a drone.’ So, full speed ahead.”
The Mule 28
Lorica’s contribution was the Mule 28, a heavy-lift, multi-mission unmanned aerial system designed and built in-house at the company’s Ashland facility.
The airframe weighs about 45 pounds, can lift about 200 pounds and is powered by eight motors turning eight 28-inch bi-blade propellers. It carries onboard artificial intelligence processing, software-defined radios and a sensor package designed to support recognition and targeting functions. The drone can also derive coordinates from its camera using trigonometry and focal length, allowing it to mark drop points on objects it identifies.
Lorica founder and CEO Christopher Dye said the company’s software, including a swarm-control system called Hive, is what makes the platform distinct.
“It doesn’t matter what the vehicle is, as long as we understand the capabilities and the parameters of the vehicle,” Dye said. “We can task the swarm based on what the job needs to get done. Right now, we’re working on natural language control, so that you can just talk to the bird and tell it, ‘Hey, I want a reconnaissance around this building. I need to know how big that ditch is before we get there, how many steps, how high the windows are.'”
Lorica currently fields three Mule 28 prototypes. The company had about six weeks to develop the airframe for the Oregon project.
Cushing said working with a domestic manufacturer to build to specification, rather than buying a commercial drone with Chinese components, was a deliberate choice that helped reduce electronic warfare and supply chain vulnerabilities.
“It’s been helpful to have contractors that can meet every specification we’re asking for and produce a drone that also meets the Army’s intent for any sort of technology that we integrate,” he said.
Soldiers with Bravo Company, 741st Brigade Engineer Battalion, 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team, conducted a proof-of-concept drone-delivered breach against a wire obstacle June 22, 2026, on Range 22 at Orchard Combat Training Center, Idaho. U.S. Army video by Maj. W. Chris Clyne, Oregon National Guard Public Affairs.
Building the safety case
The team built safety into the project by increasing risk in stages. The drone first carried an inert training aid identical in size and weight to the M1A3 Bangalore. Once the platform could reliably deliver an inert charge on target, the team progressed through limited live-fire iterations before flying a live, two-section M1A3 Bangalore torpedo.
Every iteration involving live explosives was initiated using a shock tube spooled from the drone to the obstacle. The team deliberately avoided an electronic trigger that could be jammed or prematurely activated.
“Ideally, you would love to be able to remote-detonate this without having to have a spool of shock tube,” Lucas said. “But in the LSCO environment, we’ve seen so many other systems jammed that if you have the ability to, it’s not a detriment that we’re doing it this way.”
The M1A3 Bangalore torpedo demolition kit consists of 10 tube sections, each 2.5 feet long and containing a 5-pound composition B4 main explosive charge. Doctrine permits up to four sections joined together for a single shot. The working group used two-section assemblies June 22 and made one small adjustment to prevent the blasting cap junction from pulling loose in flight.
“We’re trying to introduce a new TTP here anyway,” Cushing said. “We want to see if we can deliver a Bangalore remotely and defeat a wire obstacle. Everything beyond that is something we’ll take into consideration as the project evolves.”
Both working group officers said the broader value of the project is giving engineers a tool tailored to their core mission rather than relying only on infantry-focused drone applications that have dominated the field.
“Mobility, counter-mobility is the bread and butter of the engineers, so we should focus on leaning into that versus infantry tasks,” Lucas said.
Cushing said the Bangalore breach could become a foundation for broader experimentation.
“The platform they’ve built, if we got an entire annual training with plenty of explosives, range time, and the ability to make modifications as we go, I think we could be defeating 10, 20 times more obstacles than we’re talking about today.”
Lucas said the next conceptual step is autonomy.
“We’re not that far technologically from a drone that has an AI processor on it that could identify where concertina wire is. And you could put in a rough coordinate of, ‘Hey, I know the obstacle’s there,’ and you could send it to autonomously deploy the Bangalore on the wire with near-perfect precision, where there’s no possibility of it being jammed, because it’s all running off of internal direction.”
Dye said the next iteration of the Mule 28 will refine flight controls, dropping mechanisms and safety systems, with the goal of integrating AI-driven obstacle recognition that could allow the drone to identify a wire obstacle, position itself and release the charge autonomously. Lorica plans to return to additional inert drops in the coming weeks and is preparing for follow-on demonstrations.
Zimmerman said the successful demonstration reflected more than a new capability. It showed collaboration across the battalion.
“I’m really proud. We have a true group project that highlights innovation across everything we do is possible,” he said. “The Soldiers of Bravo Company took an idea from the battalion staff and applied their expertise to make that idea functional and effective.”
For Dye, watching the live Bangalore release and detonate as planned was, in a word, “relief.”
“It’s been very nerve-wracking the last few days,” he said.
The 741st BEB plans to capture lessons learned in a battalion white paper and forward the concept to the engineer community.
By MAJ Wayne Clyne
