Second Bend Range Facilities In GA

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 can read the full article written by Patrick Tucker of Defense One here: https://www.defenseone.com/business/2026/04/new-test-range-opens-startup-war-era/412924/?oref=d1-featured-river-top

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