ADF Wins Sixth Straight Drone Racing Title as FPV Skills Enter Tactical Training

Pilots adjusting their goggles at Randwick Barracks this week flew something more consequential than a race. The sixth Military International Drone Racing Tournament in Sydney doubled as the first MIDRT on Australian soil to include deliberate tactical training, with competitors moving between a timed FPV course and a separate exercise site near RAAF Richmond where they simulated precision strikes and aerial interceptions drawn from observed tactics in the war in Ukraine.

The Australian Defence Force team won the title for the sixth consecutive year, with the Australian Army taking first place, Singapore's Army finishing second, and the Australian Army Cadets claiming third. More than 76 pilots from Britain, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines competed across two series at Randwick Barracks during the ADF's 125th anniversary events.

The tactical component was not incidental. Wing Commander Keirin Joyce, president of the ADF Drone Racing Team and founder of the ADF Drone Racing Association, has described the skills developed through competitive FPV racing as highly translatable to tactical FPV drone scenarios. That translation is already operational: several pilots from the ADF drone racing team helped train the Australian Army's 1st Armoured Regiment's FPV strike team during Exercise Talisman Sabre last year.

Major Nicholas Guilbeault, Team USA leader from the US Air Force Research Labs, put the gap in institutional development plainly. "The Aussies and Brits have already kind of formalised it into a military sport, and for us in the US we have had no version of that to date," he said.

Australia has been building toward this moment since 2017, when it founded its drone racing association. The first MIDRT followed in 2018. The competition calendar has expanded considerably since then, with three international events now scheduled for this year alone: MIDRT_US25 in May in New York State, the Drone Crucible in Florida over the July 4 weekend, and MIDRT_UK25 planned for September in London.

Counter-drone firm DroneShield renewed its support for the ADF Drone Racing Team for 2026 in January, extending a multi-year arrangement that goes beyond financial sponsorship. The company has embedded its own pilots into ADF team activities to work alongside defence personnel on practical flying, race preparation and tactical experimentation. DroneShield Chief Executive Oleg Vornik said the renewed partnership reflects the strategic value both sides see in the programme. The company frames the arrangement as a shared learning environment, combining the ADF team's high-speed racing experience with DroneShield's expertise in detecting and countering unmanned systems.

That combination sits inside a much larger procurement picture. Australia's 2024 Integrated Investment Program committed more than $10 billion on drones, including at least $4.3 billion on uncrewed aerial systems and $690 million on uncrewed tactical systems for the Army specifically.

Oscar Warren, coordinator of ASPI's Defence Strategy program, noted after the Sydney tournament that the human capital to support this investment already exists. "Australia has a growing community of pilots, many of them young service members who taught themselves the prerequisite skills to pilot a drone incidentally, through growing up using gaming consoles, and who might never have considered joining the ADF," Warren wrote. "These young pilots are now building crucial battlefield-relevant skills through competitions including MIDRT."

Joyce has also pointed to the sport's accessibility as a recruitment and retention tool beyond the obvious demographic. "You can do it in bed, you can do it in a wheelchair, and those hours that you may have previously been unemployable while you're in a rehab program could be spent developing really useful skills," he said. "I think that is really exciting."

The Sydney podium confirmed the ADF's dominance on the racing course. What happened near RAAF Richmond suggested the competition's future lies somewhere well beyond the finish gate.