By Robbin Laird
The commander of the 101st Airborne Division has just set out the operational problem for the next generation of Army air assault. He did it in plain language, and he did not claim that a single platform will solve it.
In a recent Task & Purpose interview, Maj. Gen. David Gardner described the division’s mission: deliver a brigade, roughly 1,500 to 2,500 soldiers, into territory the enemy will contest, and be ready to fight on landing. “We expect the place that we land to be contested by the enemy, and so we’ve got to set conditions,” he said. “We’ve got to air assault a formation, and then we’ve got to fight as soon as we hit the ground and win.”
Two other points in the interview matter just as much. The first is the MV-75 Cheyenne II, which the 101st will be the first to field. The second is autonomy. Gardner did not present autonomy as an add-on. He said it is changing how air assault works: “Maybe it’s not a helicopter or a plane that drops a parachute resupply. Maybe it’s an unmanned system that does that.”
My argument is that these two points are really one point.
The MV-75 gives the division reach. Autonomous systems give that reach persistence, awareness and sustainment.
Neither delivers what Gardner is asking for without the other.
The task is to build them as one integrated force from the start, not to bolt drones onto a new aircraft after it arrives.
What the Commander Asked For
The 101st is training for what it calls Large-Scale, Long-Range Air Assault, or L2A2. In the division’s first large test, nearly 80 aircraft moved more than 3,000 soldiers from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana. They covered more than 500 miles, stopped at six forward arming and refueling points, and arrived four days later.
That exercise shows both the ambition and the limits of the current helicopter fleet. Gardner said the expectation now is “to be able to do a brigade in a single period of darkness, a deep air assault.” Six refueling stops and four days is not a single period of darkness.
When the division borrowed a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey to stand in for the MV-75 at a JRTC rotation in April, the contrast was clear. “The Osprey can do that very fast and in one leap,” Gardner said of the 500-mile trip. He also said the surrogate forced the division to work out “how we were going to command and control something that moved, expanded our battlefield, so to speak, twice as far, three times, four times as far, and twice as fast” (Task & Purpose).
The most revealing comment in the piece is about sustainment:
“We can put some things inside the helicopter, and we can put some things under a helicopter with a sling load. We’re not going to sling load something moving 250-ish knots for 500 miles. We’re not going to hang Humvees under that… We learned some things about how we need to get our equipment to the battlefield, how we need to get our sustainment to the battlefield at those distances, how we might need to rely on autonomous logistics delivery systems.”
In practice, Gardner has stated the requirement for a crewed–uncrewed air assault force.
Reach that outruns the old sustainment model needs a new sustainment model.
A battlefield “four times as far” needs a different way to see it, communicate across it and shape it before the aircraft land.
The Osprey Lesson
I have followed the Osprey since it entered Marine Corps service, and the lesson for the Army is simple. A tiltrotor does more than make the old operation faster. It changes the geometry of the operation, and the rest of the force then has to catch up.
For the Marines, the MV-22 made distances practical that rotary-wing aircraft could not cover in operationally relevant time. It also exposed every gap in the system around it: refueling, communications, fires, and getting supplies to forces that were now farther out and more dispersed. The aircraft was a forcing function for change across the force.
Bell’s Frank Lazzara made the same point about the MV-75 in the Task & Purpose article: “Being able to push a combat force out further, from further away … out of the range of certain weapons, and then be able to keep them resupplied, that is not really going to be possible with the enduring fleet alone” (Task & Purpose). The phrase “keep them resupplied” carries the weight of that sentence. A force that cannot be sustained once it is out of reach of enemy weapons is a raid, not an air assault.
The Army is unusually well placed to learn this lesson early.
It has a surrogate aircraft in the V-22.
Its first MV-75 unit is a division already experimenting with autonomy.
And there is now an institutional push behind autonomy at the top of the service.
Four Ways the MV-75 and Autonomy Work Together
Gardner’s statements point to four functions where the MV-75 and autonomous systems are complementary.
In each, the crewed aircraft carries the soldiers and the decisive cargo, and the autonomous systems extend, protect and sustain what the aircraft has delivered.
Setting Conditions Before the Landing
“We’ve got to set conditions” is the starting point. In a contested landing zone, setting conditions means finding air defenses, confirming the threat picture, jamming or deceiving enemy sensors, and in some cases striking before the main body arrives.
The Army is already building the tools for this, and they are being demonstrated today, not only promised. During Project Convergence Capstone 6, H-60M Black Hawk crews launched and controlled multiple air-launched effects in a fully networked configuration. The test showed one-to-many control and the Black Hawk serving as a gateway for over-the-horizon communications between air and ground forces. The Army has also launched effects from the AH-64E Apache, The 101st itself integrated the AEVEX Atlas, the first system fielded under the Launched Effects–Short Range program, into training at JRTC in April 2026.
The link to the MV-75 is straightforward.
If the Black Hawk can launch and control launched effects today, the aircraft that replaces it should be designed to do the same, at greater speed and range.
A flight of MV-75s flying a deep assault could put launched effects tens of kilometers ahead to scout the objective, cue fires and map the air-defense picture while the main body is still en route.
Speed matters doubly here.
A faster assault aircraft shortens the time between sensing the landing zone and arriving at it, which reduces the window the enemy has to react to what the drones have revealed.
Sustaining the Lodgment
This is where Gardner was most direct, and where the integrated approach is most needed.
The MV-75 is designed to carry 14 soldiers and an external load of up to 10,000 pounds at speeds above 300 mph. But as Gardner said, you do not hang Humvees under an aircraft flying 250 knots for 500 miles. The aircraft’s reach comes from its speed and efficiency. Building it into a slow sling-load hauler gives away what makes it valuable.
The answer is a division of labor. The MV-75 moves soldiers, critical equipment and high-value internal cargo quickly. The CH-47 fleet, which the 101st has just expanded by a battalion to form the largest combat aviation brigade in any Army division, carries heavy and outsized loads where the threat allows. Autonomous cargo systems handle what moves continuously, in small amounts, across dispersed positions: ammunition, water, batteries, blood and repair parts.
These systems are in service and in production.
The TRV-150, a 150-pound-payload electric cargo drone, has been used by the Army and Marine Corps for more than three years, mainly for resupply. Operators can give it a grid coordinate and let it calculate the route and confirm it can reach the destination. The Marines have tested it from a San Antonio-class amphibious ship. In March 2026, the Army awarded a production contract for the Joint Autonomous Aerial Resupply System to deliver cargo to dispersed forces with less dependence on convoys and crewed resupply flights.
The operational concept is to treat the MV-75 as the long-haul connector and small autonomous systems as the last tactical mile.
MV-75s deliver a brigade and its initial sustainment package to dispersed landing zones. Small cargo drones, brought in on the aircraft or pre-positioned, then distribute supplies among dispersed company and platoon positions without exposing crewed aircraft to repeated trips into contested airspace.
That is what makes the lodgment sustainable without massing helicopters over a target the enemy is now watching.
Casualty Evacuation and Force Resilience
Gardner also raised unmanned casualty evacuation. Distance changes the casualty-care problem as much as it changes logistics. When the force is hundreds of miles from its base, the “golden hour” depends on how quickly a casualty can reach a point where a fast crewed aircraft can collect them.
The pairing is similar. Autonomous ground or air systems move casualties from the point of injury to a collection point. The MV-75’s speed then cuts the long leg back to definitive care. Neither solves the problem alone.
Together they make deep air assault survivable for the soldiers asked to conduct it.
Commanding a Battlefield Four Times Larger
The least visible but most important function is command and control. Gardner said the Osprey surrogate made the division work out how to manage more airspace, more equipment and the incorporation of drones over a much larger battlespace (Task & Purpose).
A larger, faster battlefield means more airspace to manage.
Crewed tiltrotors at 250 knots, CH-47s, Apaches, launched effects, cargo drones and enemy unmanned systems will all share the same sky.
That cannot be managed with legacy procedures. It requires aircraft that act as network nodes, mission systems that can see and control uncrewed systems, and an airspace-management approach built for a mix of crewed and uncrewed aircraft.
The Black Hawk launched-effects demonstration points the way: the aircraft served as a gateway sharing information between air and ground forces.
The MV-75 should be built to play that role from the start. Its value as a node may prove as important as its value as a transport.
The Institutional Moment
The timing is good. On Oct. 1, Acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle signed a memorandum establishing the Army Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, or FASCOM. It directs the integration of autonomy into at least six formation areas, starting with aviation and sustainment. It prioritizes the fielding of crewed–uncrewed teaming and reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition capabilities no later than fiscal 2028, and expands authorizations for 15X tactical unmanned aircraft systems specialists and 390A robotics technicians.
Acting Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve then announced corps-level experiments. These include autonomous aerial ISR and lift companies in XVIII Airborne Corps, the corps to which the 101st belongs. “This goes beyond drones,” LaNeve said. “FASCOM will pioneer operational concepts that harness autonomous capabilities across all warfighting functions.”
That puts an autonomous lift and ISR experiment in the same corps as the first MV-75 unit, during the same years the aircraft moves from design into test.
It would be a missed opportunity if those efforts developed separately, with the tiltrotor community and the autonomy community each writing its own concept of operations and meeting only when the aircraft reaches the flight line.
What the Army Should Do Now
Several practical steps follow from Gardner’s own lessons.
- Design the MV-75 to launch and control drones. The mission systems and open architecture should support launching, controlling and relaying data from launched effects and autonomous cargo systems, building on what the H-60M has already demonstrated. This is far cheaper to do in design than to retrofit.
- Use the surrogate to develop the combined concept now. The 101st should keep pairing V-22 surrogate flights with current launched effects and cargo drones at JRTC, so that the combined concept of employment is tested before the first MV-75 arrives.
- Link the 101st and XVIII Airborne Corps autonomy work. The corps’ autonomous lift and ISR companies should be built around the problems the 101st identified: the sling-load limit, the last tactical mile and airspace management over a much larger battlefield.
- Place autonomy specialists in the aviation brigade. The new 15X and 390A specialists should be authorized in the combat aviation brigade and its supporting sustainment units, not held at higher echelons.
- Measure success in exercises, not briefings. The test of the concept is whether a brigade can be delivered in a single period of darkness and sustained afterward. L2A2 rotations should be scored on that standard.
Conclusion
Gardner’s interview is a statement of the requirement. A brigade, at long range, overnight, into a defended landing zone, ready to fight and then able to keep fighting. The MV-75 is essential to meeting it because, as Gardner showed with the Osprey, it collapses distance and time.
Reach alone does not win the fight on the ground. The aircraft gets the force there. Autonomous systems help it see the objective before arrival, sustain it once it is on the ground, evacuate its wounded, and give commanders a picture of a battlefield several times larger than the one they plan for today.
The 101st has already learned, through its own exercises, that it may “need to rely on autonomous logistics delivery systems.”
The next step is to build the MV-75 force and the autonomous force as one integrated system, so that both arrive at Fort Campbell ready to fight together.