U.S. Army picks Michigan base as one of four national drone test sites

A patch of forest and lakeshore in northern Michigan has become one of the most important pieces of real estate in the U.S. military’s race to catch up with China on drone warfare.

Camp Grayling and the National All-Domain Warfighting Center, a sprawling military training complex in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula, has been selected by the Army as one of only four sites nationwide where private drone makers can now test their technology directly alongside the military, U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, announced Thursday.

The designation came from the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, the branch of the Army responsible for verifying that new equipment actually works before troops rely on it in combat, working in partnership with the Michigan National Guard and U.S. Africa Command, the Pentagon’s regional command overseeing military operations across the African continent. Together they selected Grayling as one of five premier military test ranges worldwide, and one of four inside the United States, that are now open to private industry for what the Army describes as accelerated research, development and rapid experimentation on emerging defense technologies, chiefly small drones and the systems built to shoot them down.

Slotkin, who has pushed for this designation alongside a bipartisan group of Michigan lawmakers, framed the announcement as a direct economic and strategic win for the state.

“This an important win for Michigan, selected as one of only four sites nationwide, that helps our role in developing, testing and building new tech for the U.S. Army. Opening Camp Grayling to collaborate with private industry means manufacturers, startups, and engineers – of all sizes — will get a direct line to the Army. This will bring companies from across the nation to Michigan to test their systems against the same conditions we are seeing on the battlefield in Ukraine right now. And they’ll be doing it with American supply chains and American workers,” said Slotkin.

The push to land this designation for Michigan did not happen overnight. Slotkin, fellow Senator Gary Peters and Representative Jack Bergman, along with the broader Michigan Congressional delegation, first made their case in a letter sent to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on July 29, 2025, urging him to name the National All-Domain Warfighting Center as one of three new national drone test sites the Pentagon had been ordered to establish. That letter, signed by senators and House members from both parties, argued the Michigan site already had a proven record running drone testing during Exercise Northern Strike, the largest reserve forces training exercise in the country, and pointed to a dedicated 60-mile-long by 6-mile-wide (97-km by 10-km) drone corridor set to open at the base. The lawmakers also cited the base’s scale as a selling point, noting the center spans nearly 150,000 acres (61,000 hectares) of training land and controls roughly 17,000 square miles (44,000 square kilometers) of special-use military airspace stretching out over Lake Huron, giving drone operators room to fly and test weapons that would be far too dangerous or disruptive to try over populated areas.

Camp Grayling’s appeal goes beyond sheer size. The lawmakers’ letter noted the range offers year-round, all-weather testing across every domain the military now fights in, land, air, sea, cyber and space, allowing companies and the Army to pressure-test drones under conditions ranging from live-fire exercises to contested electronic warfare, where an enemy jams or spoofs communications and navigation signals. Because it operates as a National Guard base rather than an active-duty installation, Michigan’s ranges also allow companies to rent space directly on-site and get open access to training areas for commercial drone testing, a flexibility the lawmakers argued makes the location both cheaper and faster to work with than comparable ranges elsewhere in the country.

The Army is simultaneously opening Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the West Cibola Range at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center in Mississippi and the African Multidomain Training and Experimentation Center in Morocco to the same kind of private-sector access, giving companies working on drones, counter-drone systems, long-range weapons and low-cost interceptors, cheaper alternatives to expensive missiles designed to knock small threats out of the sky, a menu of testing environments across different terrains and climates. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll cast the effort as a direct attack on the bureaucratic hurdles that have historically kept smaller, newer companies from working with the military at all.

“A company with a good idea shouldn’t need a team of lawyers and a program of record just to prove their equipment works. So we fixed that. One front door — testrange.army.mil — a real person to walk you in, and on the other side, everything the modern battlefield demands: contested airspace, degraded signals and the space to test at real scale,” said Driscoll.

The Army has already scheduled its first major event under the new initiative, a specialized test during the week of September 13, 2026 at Camp Grayling designed to simulate the kind of degraded, jammed electronic warfare environment American and Ukrainian forces have encountered on the battlefield in Ukraine, giving companies a rare chance to see whether their drones and counter-drone systems can actually survive that kind of interference rather than just perform well in a clean laboratory setting. The Army said it expects to repeat that kind of event on a quarterly basis going forward, and companies looking to get involved do not need an existing government contract or prior relationship with the Pentagon to request range time through the newly launched online portal, testrange.army.mil, where a dedicated staff member is assigned to walk each applicant through the scheduling process.