Second Bend Labs
By Patrick Tucker
Science & Technology Editor
April 17, 2026 06:00 AM ET
Industry
Drones
A new, 400,000-acre testing and training facility aims to bring troops and defense firms together so they can innovate at the speed of modern warfare.On Friday, Georgia-based Second Bend Labs announced the public opening of the facility near Moody Air Force Base. It’s designed to appeal to two usually separate groups whose challenges can only be solved together. Soldiers need to test drones and counter-drone equipment against a competent adversary, and drone startups need to see if their stuff works. That requires a new approach to the military test range: a site that civilians can easily access, unlike a military base, and that allows military drone testing, unlike a regular expanse of private acreage.Simply creating a place where a young company can fly medium-sized drones at the altitude of an A-10 Warthog and have soldiers shoot at it might seem obvious. It isn’t. It’s a problem that Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg discussed in his confirmation hearing as a major obstacle to modernization, and that Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon’s acquisition undersecretary have called burdensome to innovators. It’s also a problem that Ukraine has solved out of necessity, making the wartorn country a central testing site for drone and counter-drone warfare.“You need to train the way you fight in realistic mission environments,” said Stu Booker, a former Air Force combat controller who is now Second Bend’s president of unmanned and autonomous systems. “Our clients, whether they are testing new technology, developing new tactics, or sharpening existing skills, are doing it in conditions that reflect the complexity of the environments they will actually fight in.”The site offers diverse terrain and five miles of riverfront water for testing land and sea drones. It sits within Moody’s Corsair South Military Operations Area, which enables testing of low-altitude air support craft like the A-10 Warthog but also, increasingly, small and medium drones. The facility has a range complex designed to Defense Department specifications, a 3,000-square-foot hangar, and an adjacent 20-foot launch pad. It also has “personnel in private guest home lodging, chef-supported meals, a 2,000-square-foot gym, and 3,000 square feet of team bonding spaces,” according to a press release for the lab. The idea is to create something akin to a modern co-working space or even a tech accelerator, allowing startups to collaborate and share gear. Think back to the Silicon Valley campuses of Google, Facebook (before Meta), and Twitter (before X) in the 2000s. One thing the company is still working on is getting changes or waivers to local and federal regulations that limit its ability to replicate jamming and other electromagnetic warfare effects—the biggest factor driving evolution on the Ukrainian battlefield