WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force is expanding its partnership with an expert drone-racing league that touts a tech-savvy fan base, which leaders consider will likely engage with and potentially enlist within the military.
The Drone Racing League’s 2023-2024 season will for the primary time feature an Air Force-endorsed pilot and flight deck, capping seven years of growing collaboration. An inaugural STEM day can be planned, during which children and young families can find out about tinkering and piloting.
The exposure to science, technology, engineering and arithmetic — key to twitchy, physics-based drone racing — could help shape future airmen, the service argues.
Military recruitment efforts have struggled for years: The Army missed its fiscal 2022 recruiting goal by roughly 15,000 recent soldiers, and the Air Force this yr is predicted to fall about 10% wanting its own goal. The explanations vary: Fewer Americans are meeting basic fitness standards, a healthy job market is luring candidates away from signing up and overall confidence in public institutions has sharply contracted.
Brig. Gen. Christopher Amrhein, the commander of the Air Force Recruiting Service, told C4ISRNET that the Drone Racing League’s patrons are a part of a perfect pool from which to hunt recruits.
“The competition is spectacular, the content is immersive and academic, and the league engages a coveted audience of young, high-energy tech-setters who’ve a passion for flight, innovation and technology,” he said July 26. “They’re future U.S. Air Force recruits and airmen, and a core reason why we proceed to renew our partnership with DRL yr after yr.”
What does the league do?
The Drone Racing League defines “tech-setters” as 16- to 34-year-olds not drawn to legacy sports like football, baseball and basketball. As a substitute, the demographic gravitates toward technology, competitive gaming and simulation.
The DRL racing premise is deceptively easy: A pilot must maneuver a drone from a primary person perspective through an obstacle course as quickly as possible and in competition with other fliers. Points are dished out based on results.
Competitions are held in stadiums across the globe and within the virtual realm, via the DRL Simulator, a sensible video game.
The DRL Simulator already features an Air Force workbench, where players can construct custom racing drones, and the Air Force Boneyard maps, where players can zoom through a deserted airport within the daytime or darkness.
The league’s metrics show greater than 80% of fans favor collaboration with the Air Force, a long-standing partner. Internal data also shows fans are 30 times more likely to interact with the service on social media channels. Previous races logged 260 million global streaming views.
“Really from day one, we’ve seen this endemic fit of the Air Force wanting to recruit the most effective and brightest,” DRL President Rachel Jacobson told C4ISRNET in an interview. “If you take a look at this tech-setter audience that we call our fans, you see that they’re wired to like technology, innovation, engineering, precision, sports — all of those areas which have grow to be helpful skill sets for the Air Force.”
Interest in drones has ballooned lately alongside their prevalence inside militaries, police departments and hobby groups. The worldwide industrial drone market is predicted to achieve $38 billion by 2027, in line with Statista, a data-gathering and evaluation firm.
Because the U.S. military increasingly leans into uncrewed technologies, it’ll require well-versed engineers, technicians and distant pilots. Such a cohort is familiar to the Drone Racing League.
“As a technology-powered sport, STEM is at the guts of every little thing we do. It’s literally the beating heart of DRL,” said Jacobson, a former NBA business development executive. “From the drones to the radio networks, our expert engineers are hand-developing each piece of technology that makes our high-speed drones available.”
Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a each day newspaper in South Carolina. Colin can be an award-winning photographer.