As deformation rate increases, the thermally activated dislocation glide gives way to a continuous glide of dislocations governed by their interactions with phonons. Understanding the dislocation-phonon drag regime is critical for designing metallic materials for extreme deformations rates. However, it has proven challenging to study empirically, partly due to the resource intensive nature of the experimental approaches targeting this regime. Here, we develop an impression-based experimental approach combining laser-induced microprojectile impact (Hassani et al., 2020a) and spherical nanoindentation to characterize the dislocation-phonon drag regime. We also develop a physically based constitutive framework that, when integrated with our experimental measurements, can quantify the dislocation-phonon drag regime. We isolate the effect of dislocation-phonon drag by leveraging the similar deformation geometries and length scales but different operative mechanisms during spherical nanoindentation and microprojectile impact. We discuss mechanistic contributions to the plastic work for microprojectile impacts in a range of impact velocities producing strain rates up to 109 s−1. We also develop a deformation mechanism map focused on the transition from thermal activation to dislocation drag for a model FCC metal, copper.