The Pentagon, if we let them, will buy a million drones over the next few years.
You read that right. One million.
This spending spree is premised on the Pentagon’s frankly dumbass belief that the next war will look like the one Ukraine is fighting (a trench-warfare style slog), rather than the kind the U.S. has spent decades and billions preparing to fight with airpower and long-range precision weapons.
Before I explain why that’s (very) wrong, here’s how the military came to that view. As drones shrink in size and AI promises to make them autonomous, the Pentagon is convinced they won't just shape the future of war but usher in a completely new way of waging it.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration envisions a Marshall Plan-style program to pump out millions of American-made drones. As they see it, this will revitalize the American defense industry and end reliance on foreign suppliers.
“Do you want to be the victor in the game of drones?” White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka said at a Small Business Administration ▶event last week, touting the million-drone vision to a bunch of American entrepreneurs.
The future, Gorka explained, “has to be American — otherwise, we are at the mercy of others, and we cannot permit that.”
Gorka isn’t the only administration official hawking drones. In his own theatrical display, Secretary of whatever he is Pete Hegseth released a video (see below) last year of himself signing a directive delivered directly to him by a drone emblazoned with American flags.
“ We will deliver tens of thousands of small drones to our force in 2026,” Hegseth said, adding: “and hundreds of thousands of them by 2027.”
He accompanied the stunt with an official memorandum titled “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance.” While the signed two-page cover memo stuck to broad rhetoric about cutting red tape and learning lessons from Ukraine, the Pentagon’s accompanying implementation guidance laid out the explicit mandate: “By the end of 2026, every squad [the lowest echelon of the Army and Marine Corps] will have low-cost, expendable drones.”
Then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll took it even further. He announced that the Army would buy “at least a million drones within the next two to three years” — twenty times the roughly 50,000 it buys annually — suggesting that it could buy millions more every year after that.
Then, Hegseth unveiled his $1 billion “Drone Dominance” program: 340,000 small attack drones over two years, at a price per drone that’s supposed to fall from $5,000 to $2,300 at full production.
By that thinking, the U.S. can buy a million drones even cheaper; hell, buy enough and the price can be reduced to zero. Before we get to billions (or trillions, because why not?), it’s worth pointing out what a scam this all is.
As long as the Pentagon is throwing around big numbers, let’s review: In the entirety of the Ukraine war, that is, over four-plus years, some 10 million drones have been used by both sides, which is where the one million (per year!) is roughly extrapolated. The vast majority of those drones have been the small “first-person view” (FPV) drones that the Army is referring to.
These are a lot of drones, but this isn’t necessarily the future of warfare. Russia has been resorting to the use of so many drones because it has been unable to conquer its smaller and weaker neighbor and because it is afraid to fly its airplanes over Ukraine (or when it does so, it can’t coordinate or carry out a sustained attack). Ukraine, by contrast, has been the model of self defense. Yet despite the use of these millions of drones, neither side has been able to shift the stalemate. And the cost in human lives from World War I-style warfare has been staggering, more than half a million soldiers killed.
There is no part of this war that we should want to emulate, so the question has to be asked of the U.S. military: Are they crazy? Do they foresee any kind of trench warfare with American “squads” shooting a million drones? When their maximum distance is only three miles? Putting soldiers intentionally in harm’s way just because that’s the range of their weapons? Do they forget that the U.S. has already spent billions upon billions to buy precision artillery and longer range ground attack missiles specifically so we don’t have to put our soldiers in harm’s way? Do they forget that we have airpower, that THAT is the American way of war? Do we really want to indulge Hegseth and his big-dumb-lug Army boots on the ground view of the world (or its price tag)?
“The days of $35,000 drones,” CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, “those days are behind us.”
Cooper was talking about the cheap drones U.S. forces faced from the Houthis in Yemen. The real threat, Cooper said, comes from Iranian drones that are jet-powered and packed with high-end sensors.
In the current Iran war, Tehran has fired just over 7,000 “one-way attack” drones at Israel and the Gulf states, and more than 90 percent were intercepted. Tellingly, when Cooper talked up American drones, he didn’t mention the cheap, short-range quadcopters Hegseth wants a million of. Cooper singled out LUCAS, which debuted in the Iran war. A long-range knockoff of Iran’s own Shahed-136, the LUCAS gives the military another way to strike beyond artillery and missiles. At upwards of $35,000 apiece, each one costs seven to ten times more than Hegseth’s “Drone Dominance” models.
In other words, one can buy a flock of cheap small drones — but what would they be for, other than to satisfy some obsolete image of warfare of the future where airpower, space power, and cyber power are absent? Who in their right mind thinks that? Where is it likely that such a three-mile range American swarm would even be needed?
Dozens of companies — small and big alike — smell Washington’s latest obsession and are only too happy to take our tax dollars to provide the military with something it wants to buy.
All of this is particularly grotesque amid an affordability crisis, as well as a war with Iran that in many ways already is the war of the future: a demonstration that we can hit this target and that one, with little regard for the fallout or what comes next. That’s what you get when the technology is better than the thinking.
Drone Dominance? How about budget dominance. And some — literally *any — *thinking.
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— Edited by William M. Arkin
