AINEWS
A US Army Green Beret drill at Hohenfels, Germany, has been redesigned around Ukraine's small unit drone problem. Poland is the first NATO ally to run it.
On a moonless, rainy night at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center near Hohenfels, in southeast Germany, Polish special forces slipped out of a building dressed as a church and moved toward a tree line. That move was the opening of a small-team infiltration designed to end with a drone strike on a rear enemy target, a deliberate swap of a platoon-sized assault for a handful of soldiers and a quadcopter.
The exercise was originally built by US Army Green Berets for US special forces, and the Associated Press was granted rare access to watch it run. The Joint Multinational Readiness Center is the US Army's primary European training ground for multinational exercises, a few thousand acres of Bavarian forest and village mock-ups about an hour southeast of Nuremberg. According to the AP, this is only the second and third time the drill has been held. Both previous runs took place in 2026, and each was conducted by a different Green Beret team. Poland is the first NATO ally to undertake the training.
The Green Beret officer overseeing the Polish iteration, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the work, framed the redesign plainly. "We're using lessons learned from Ukraine," the officer said Thursday. "All of those effects that we're seeing either Russia or Ukraine having to overcome — we're doing our best to replicate." The 4 1/2-year reference is to the length of Ukraine's effort to repel Russian forces, a war in which small quadcopters and first-person-view drones have reshaped what a squad can do and what a squad can hide from.
What the drill encodes is a single, specific shift: a small team that infiltrates enemy territory on foot, places a drone, and strikes a high-value rear target, rather than a larger formation that closes on the same objective by ground assault. The premise is that on a modern battlefield, where drones watch every road and tree line, a larger group is a larger target. A single well-placed quadcopter can do the work of a platoon, and the troops who place it can stay out of sight on the way in. That is the lesson Ukraine's small units have written into their tactics over the past four and a half years, and that the Green Berets have now repackaged for allied special operations forces.
The Polish team practiced the infiltration, drone placement, and strike sequence in a simulated village and the surrounding woods, with the rear target staged to look like a command post or logistics node. US Army special forces trainers, the Green Berets among them, ran the iteration. The Polish unit was not named in the AP report, but the drill format, a small team assigned a high-value rear target on a drone-watched battlefield, is the through line that the Hohenfels version is meant to teach. The redesign was guided by the Green Beret teams that ran the previous two iterations, both in 2026, with a specific eye to the drone observation problem Ukraine's troops have spent years solving on the move.
The backdrop is the broader reshuffling of the US military posture in Europe. The Trump administration has warned of troop drawdowns on the continent even as US coordination with NATO and Ukraine has continued. CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow this week to warn Russia against attacking NATO countries, according to The Wall Street Journal, as relayed by the AP. Three Western officials, who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters, said Russia has the appetite for sabotage and cyberattacks against NATO but that President Vladimir Putin wants to avoid direct confrontation.
A single exercise with one Polish team is not, on its own, a NATO-wide doctrinal shift. The Hohenfels iteration is, however, a tangible artifact of method transfer: a US Army drill that did not exist before this year and is now being run for a foreign partner, with the syllabus rewritten around the specific problem of how a small unit moves and strikes on a drone-watched battlefield. The next iteration, the AP reported, will be the test of whether the method travels beyond a single Green Beret team and a single Polish special forces unit.