Gen. Dan Caine used one word Wednesday that ought to get the attention of every American soldier who might someday have to cross a battlefield.

Hunted.

“We have to assume from now on that our formations will be hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum, and tracked in real time,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Air, Space & Cyber Conference outside Washington.

That’s a remarkable warning from America’s senior military officer.

It also isn’t entirely new.

More than a year ago, Army Lt. Col. Antonio Salinas and Jason LeVay were already arguing that cheap first-person-view drones were doing something much bigger than adding another weapon to the battlefield.

They were changing land warfare.

Writing in War on the Rocks in May 2025, Salinas and LeVay compared the arrival of the small attack drone to earlier revolutions in warfare. Their argument was that armies could not simply buy drones and hand them to existing units. The new weapons would eventually force changes in formations, tactics, training and doctrine.

They used another word that now sounds remarkably close to Caine’s.

Hunted.

“From 2025 on, ground forces without drones are extremely vulnerable,” they wrote. “They’ll be hunted from the sky, tagged by sensors, and carved up by fearless machines.”

Two months later, I wrote about their warning in The Military Report under the headline:

“Rewrite the Infantry Manual — The Drones Have Taken Over.”

The point then was fairly simple.

For generations, American infantry training has been built around what happens when soldiers make contact with the enemy. Rifle fire cracks. A machine gun opens up. Soldiers find cover, identify where the fire is coming from and maneuver against it.

But what happens when the enemy doesn’t fire a rifle?

What happens when the first indication that you’ve been found is the buzzing of something overhead?

And what happens when eventually there isn’t even a pilot on the other end?

Fourteen months later, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is warning American forces to prepare for exactly that battlefield.

Ukraine Has Been Writing the Manual

Caine pointed directly to Ukraine.

First-person-view drones there are operating in an environment where both sides try to jam radio signals and navigation. Some drones now use artificial-intelligence-assisted computer vision that can help them continue toward a target even after GPS or the connection with the operator has been lost.

Think about what that means to the infantryman.

Jamming the drone may no longer be enough.

Breaking the communications link may no longer be enough.

Hiding from the operator may no longer be enough.

The machine may already know what it is chasing.

Caine said the result is inexpensive precision firepower available to relatively small military units.

That is almost precisely the transformation Salinas and his co-authors were describing.

In June 2025, Salinas, Mark Askew and LeVay went further. They argued that drones were allowing infantry to find and attack enemies beyond the soldiers’ own line of sight. The rifleman’s battlefield was no longer limited to what he could see from where he stood.

By August, the three were asking an even larger question: how does an army maneuver on a battlefield saturated with drones?

Their comparison was the tank.

Tanks appeared during World War I, but the machine itself didn’t immediately revolutionize warfare. Armies had to figure out how to combine armor with infantry, artillery, aircraft, communications and new tactics.

The weapon came first.

The doctrine had to catch up.

That may be where the U.S. Army finds itself with drones.

The Army Hasn’t Been Standing Still

It would be wrong to suggest the Army ignored what was happening.

It hasn’t.

The Army’s “Transformation in Contact” effort has been putting new equipment directly into operational units and letting soldiers figure out what works instead of waiting years for the traditional procurement system to produce a finished solution.

Drones have been an important part of that effort.

The Army has been experimenting with small drones at different levels of combat units, including systems intended for reconnaissance and finding targets. The service has also been working on the other half of the problem: how to shoot enemy drones down.

This spring, soldiers in the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division described spending the previous 18 months wrestling with what they called a battlefield of “ubiquitous drones, persistent sensors, and machine-speed targeting.”

Their answer wasn’t simply another gadget. They developed a different way of thinking about how armored forces find, isolate and attack an enemy.

In April, the Army also tested software at Aberdeen Proving Ground that allows a remotely operated weapon mounted on a vehicle to engage small drones while the vehicle itself is moving.

So the Army sees the problem.

The harder question is whether it can change fast enough.

Buying Drones Isn’t the Same as Changing an Army

This is where Salinas’s original argument becomes important.

A military revolution isn’t necessarily created by the weapon.

It happens when the weapon forces everything around it to change.

The musket changed formations.

The machine gun helped empty battlefields of massed infantry.

The tank changed maneuver warfare.

Aircraft changed what armies could see and strike far beyond their front lines.

Drones may be doing something similar.

They have pushed observation and precision attack downward toward small units. A capability that once required aircraft, sophisticated sensors and considerable infrastructure can increasingly be carried by soldiers.

But there is another side to that bargain.

The enemy gets the same capability.

That means American soldiers may have to assume that whenever they move, somebody — or something — is watching.

A command post gives off signals.

Vehicles leave tracks and heat.

Radios transmit.

Antennas radiate.

Supply trucks have to move.

Soldiers eventually have to leave cover.

And above them may be drones looking for exactly those signatures.

Caine called it being “tracked in real time.”

That phrase may ultimately matter as much as “hunted.”

Because an Army that can always be seen has to learn to fight differently.

The Battlefield Is Becoming Transparent

For much of modern warfare, soldiers survived partly by denying the enemy information.

Hide the tank.

Camouflage the artillery.

Move the command post.

Travel at night.

Keep radio transmissions short.

Use terrain.

Those things aren’t suddenly useless.

But the number of eyes searching for the soldier has multiplied.

Some are drones.

Some are satellites.

Some are electronic sensors.

Some may eventually be machines examining enormous amounts of imagery and electronic data faster than humans ever could.

At the same conference, Brig. Gen. Todd Benson, commander of Space Forces Central, described what he calls “hyper-transparent warfare.”

His explanation was considerably less technical.

“You just can’t hide anymore,” he said.

That may be an exaggeration in the literal sense. Soldiers will continue trying to hide, deceive and confuse an enemy, and militaries will continue developing ways to defeat sensors and drones.

But the direction is unmistakable.

Finding the enemy is becoming cheaper.

Following him is becoming easier.

And attacking him can increasingly be done without putting another human being within rifle range.

Now Comes Autonomy

There is another important difference between the warning in 2025 and Caine’s warning in 2026.

Last year’s discussion centered heavily on drones.

Caine is talking about autonomous systems.

Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Many of today’s small attack drones still have a human being controlling them. But artificial intelligence and computer vision increasingly allow machines to perform portions of the mission themselves.

That begins to change the contest between the drone and the soldier.

A radio-controlled drone depends upon a connection.

An increasingly autonomous drone may not.

Salinas and LeVay saw that coming, too.

Their 2025 article warned that the next stage after today’s first-person-view drones could be small, coordinated groups of increasingly autonomous machines operating near the front.

Their larger point wasn’t that some particular futuristic drone was inevitable.

It was that today’s drone war was probably the beginning rather than the end of the transformation.

Caine is now telling the force to prepare accordingly.

Fourteen Months Later

There is a tendency in military history to identify revolutions afterward.

The machine gun changed warfare.

The airplane changed warfare.

The tank changed warfare.

The aircraft carrier changed naval warfare.

Those conclusions are easy to write once the shooting has stopped.

They are considerably harder while the revolution is underway.

In July 2025, The Military Report asked whether it was time to rewrite the infantry manual because drones had already changed the battlefield.

Fourteen months later, America’s senior military officer is telling U.S. forces that they must assume they will be hunted by autonomous machines.

The Army is experimenting. It is buying drones. It is testing counter-drone weapons. Units are developing new tactics. Soldiers are learning lessons coming out of Ukraine.

All of that matters.

But Salinas’s original warning was bigger than equipment.

If drones really represent a revolution in land warfare, eventually the Army itself has to look different.

The platoon may have to change.

The company may have to change.

The brigade may have to change.

Logistics, communications, camouflage, movement and training may have to change with them.

And the Army may have to accept one particularly uncomfortable fact:

The next American ground war may begin with soldiers entering a battlefield where the enemy already knows they are coming.

Caine’s warning tells us the Pentagon understands that possibility.

The question now isn’t whether the drones have changed the battlefield.

It’s whether the Army can change before it has to fight on it.