• The new Robotics Integration Group will turn battlefield drone lessons into service-wide training.
• The Corps has an attack drone team and a new counter-drone team to test tactics against threats.
• The moves reflect growing urgency driven by Ukraine and fights in the Middle East.

The Marine Corps is standing up a new organization designed to rapidly turn battlefield drone lessons, like best practices for defeating hostile drones or using them to spy on and attack an enemy, into standardized training for more Marines.

Drone warfare is evolving quickly and has reshaped battlefields. To meet the challenge, the new Marine Corps Robotics Integration Group, or MCRIG, will serve as the service's hub for institutionalizing training on small drones and counter-drone systems across the force, according to a press release from the Corps' Training and Education Command.

At the same time, the service is also launching its new Marine Corps Counter Drone Team to test emerging counter-drone technologies and tactics, a defensive sibling to the service's offensive drone team it created last year.

Earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Benjamin Watson, who oversees Training and Education Command, told Business Insider about the expected creation of the counter-drone team, explaining that the Corps intended to "pressurize the learning and dedicate a small, highly qualified group of individuals to learning just as fast in the counter-drone space as we have been in the drone operation space."

The Corps hopes its two new teams will speed up the journey from experimentation, consolidated within its offensive and defensive drone teams, to broader training across its units before Marines deploy to combat zones.

At the Marines' annual symposium in April, another Marine Corps general shared the outcomes of a recent exercise in which Marines faced off against drones in the field.

"It went about as expected," said Maj. Gen. Mark Clingan, who oversees Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command, adding that during the training, "the Marines had a really difficult time going downrange and dealing with the drones."

The Marines are also in the middle of figuring out which troops make the best drone pilots, how to standardize training pipelines, how to differentiate between friendly and hostile drones, and how to defeat drones on the move.

These efforts come as the broader military continues to grapple with the opportunities and threats that come from the proliferation of drones, particularly small, low-cost uncrewed aerial systems, and learn lessons from recent conflicts, from Ukrainian battlefields to fights in the Middle East. Employing them offensively is one thorny challenge. The second is finding large-scale, reliable methods for defeating enemy drones.

"The battlefield continues to demonstrate that small unmanned aircraft systems are no longer niche capabilities," said Clingan in a released statement. Drones, many of which are small enough to fit in a single hand, are now indispensable for military missions like reconnaissance and offensive strikes.

• US forces used ATACMS to sink Iranian warships during Operation Epic Fury, the top US general said.
• Gen. Dan Caine announced that US artillery has helped to render the Iranian navy ineffective.
• ATACMS provide substantial striking power to ground forces.

The top US general revealed Friday that American troops involved in Operation Epic Fury have used a ballistic missile system to sink Iranian warships, including a submarine, offering some insight into the targets US artillery is engaging in this war.

Artillery soldiers and Marines are "sinking ships, destroying depots, and launching Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS," and "Precision Strike Missiles, or PrSMs," Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a Friday press briefing.

"From outside Iran, our Army and Marine artillerymen are hitting sites that Iran relies on to project power beyond their borders," he said.

"In just the first 13 days of this operation, our artillery forces have made history," Caine said.

"They fired the first precision strike missiles ever used in combat, reaching deep into enemy territory," he said. "They've used Army ATACMS to sink multiple ships, including a submarine."

US forces are "continuing to destroy the Iranian Navy to ensure freedom of navigation. He said that the US military is targeting mine-laying vessels and the ability to target commercial vessels.

"In less than two weeks, we've rendered the Iranian Navy combat ineffective and continue to attack naval vessels, including all of their Soleimani-class warships, which were armed with anti-ship missiles and anti-aircraft weapons," Caine said.

Other naval targets sunk include Iran's new purpose-built drone carrier.

Army Tactical Missile Systems are typically used to target land-based targets, such as enemy air defense systems and logistics hubs.

Each missile costs upward of $1 million, depending on the range and type of warhead. ATACMS missiles can hit targets out to as far as about 200 miles away and are fired using the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System or M240 Multiple Launch Rocket System launchers. The HIMARS can also fire PrSMs and much shorter-range guided rockets.

The Lockheed Martin-built ATACMS is guided by GPS and inertial navigation that tracks its flight toward a designated target, and hence cannot be used to accurately fire on moving targets. For this reason, it's likely that the ships destroyed were pierside or moored.

The ATACMS augments the strike power of Army and Marine Corps artillery, allowing land force commanders to hit critical targets without relying on air or naval forces to deliver the strike. The system was designed during the Cold War and first used in combat in the 1991 Gulf War.

The Ukrainians have also used their limited supply of US-provided ATACMS to hit Russian military facilities. With these weapons in short supply, Ukraine has since developed its own domestically built capabilities.

US forces have attacked over 6,000 targets in Iran, Caine said on Friday. As the US and Israel have established air supremacy over Iran, allowing bombers and fighters to fly overhead, they've shifted to munitions like gravity bombs, which are much cheaper to produce and more plentiful in the US arsenal than missiles.

• A KC-135 refueling aircraft "went down" in Iraq, the US military announced Thursday evening.
• A second unidentified aircraft was involved but landed safely.
• All six crew members were killed in the crash, the military said Friday.

The US military said on Friday that all six crew members were killed after their KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq on Thursday.

The deaths mark the US Air Force's first losses since the start of Operation Epic Fury on February 28.

Seven other US service members have been killed in action during the war, with at least 140 others injured. Many of them have returned to duty; some, however, were more seriously wounded.

CENTCOM said it is investigating the KC-135 incident, which occurred at roughly 2 p.m. ET on Thursday in western Iraq. It said that the "loss of the aircraft was not due to hostile fire or friendly fire."

"The identities of the service members are being withheld until 24 hours after next of kin have been notified," the military said.

The US first acknowledged on Thursday that it had lost a KC-135 refueling aircraft supporting the combat operations against Iran. A second aircraft involved in the incident landed safely.

This crash marks the fourth American aircraft loss since the start of Epic Fury, the Pentagon's name for US operations against Iran, nearly two weeks ago.

Just days into the war, CENTCOM announced that three US F-15E Strike Eagles were downed by friendly fire over Kuwait. The aircraft were lost, but all six aircrew members ejected safely.

The KC-135 Stratotanker is an Air Force asset that supports the broader joint force by refueling other aircraft — including fighter jets, bombers, and cargo aircraft — in notoriously complex midair refueling operations.

It is essentially a flying gas station that executes fuel transfers at high speed with aircraft in proximity.

March 13, 2026 — This story has been updated with the latest information from US Central Command, which has revealed the loss of all crew members.