Key Points and Summary – Cheap, ubiquitous drones are reshaping modern warfare—from Ukraine to Gaza—by destroying armor and forcing costly interceptions.
-A CNAS report warns the U.S. remains unprepared for current and future drone threats as $1K quadcopters drain million-dollar missiles.
U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Colin Clark, a mortarman assigned to Bravo Company, Battalion Landing Team 1/5, 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and a native of Texas, engages a target with a NightFighter S counter-unmanned aerial vehicle system during a demonstration for Philippine Marines assigned to Intelligence Company, 3rd Marine Brigade, as part of exercise KAMANDAG 8 at Tarumpitao Point, Palawan Province, Philippines, Oct. 17, 2024. KAMANDAG is an annual Philippine Marine Corps and U.S. Marine Corps-led exercise aimed at enhancing the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ defense and humanitarian capabilities by providing valuable training in combined operations with foreign militaries in the advancement of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. This year marks the eighth iteration of this exercise and includes participants from the French Armed Forces, Royal Thai Marine Corps, and Indonesian Marine Corps; including continued participation from the Australian Defense Force, British Armed Forces, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, and Republic of Korea Marine Corps. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Amelia Kang)
Bohdan, a drone pilot from the Unmanned Systems Battalion of Ukraine’s 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade, pilots an FPV drone in Donetsk Oblast during active battle operations. Photo: David Kirichenko
-America’s slow, centralized procurement favored exquisite platforms like MQ-9s over expendable FPVs, while rivals iterate rapidly at scale.
-The Pentagon’s Replicator aims to field thousands of attritable autonomous systems across domains, but budget, timelines, and production capacity loom. Bottom line: to avoid losing the drone fight, the U.S. must mass-produce low-cost UAVs, deploy layered counter-UAS, and compress acquisition from years to months.
Is the U.S. Military Losing the Drone War?
In recent conflicts, unmanned aerial systems (UAS) – or drones – have changed the way wars are fought.
Cheap, easy to produce, and small, these unmanned aerial vehicles, or loitering munitions, are now punching well above their weight, forcing even advanced militaries to respond differently and field high-value assets in new ways.
From Ukraine to Gaza, drones have played a massive role in these new conflicts. They can be deployed quickly, and small quadcopters that cost less than $1,000 USD each are now destroying armored vehicles.
Drones were even used by Ukrainian forces in the famed Operation Spider’s Web to destroy high-value Russian aircraft. It’s clear that every single military on earth needs to adapt, and a new report from the Center for a New American Security has warned that the U.S. military remains “unprepared to defend against present and future drone threats that have eroded decades of American air dominance.”
The problem isn’t complicated, but it is very serious. U.S. forces are often using missile interceptors that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – or sometimes even millions of dollars – to shoot down drones worth only a few thousand. The math simply doesn’t work in a sustained fight, and the Pentagon urgently needs – as many analysts are now warning – an affordable counter-drone system.
The U.S. has witnessed this new battlefield dynamic play out in Ukraine, where both sides are now deploying fleets of first-person-view (FPV) drones – cheap, camera-equipped platforms controlled via video goggles – to strike tanks, trenches, and more.
These drones have become hugely valuable tools for both the Ukrainians and the Russians, and they are being produced rapidly in the tens of thousands.
The lesson should be obvious to everyone by now: whoever can mass-produce and integrate drones the fastest will hold the advantage. And while Russia may be technologically behind the United States in many ways, and currently preoccupied with its war in Ukraine, the fact is that Russia may be better prepared for drone warfare today than the United States.
While Russia expands drone infrastructure, the U.S. is focused on big-ticket programs like fighter jets, bombers, and carriers.
And while those programs are essential to guarantee the future fighting force of the world’s strongest military, they are also behind schedule and over budget. So, is the U.S. doing enough to adapt?
Where the U.S. Fell Behind
America’s procurement system was never built for speed. The military’s acquisition process/cycle can take a decade or more —an eternity in a field where consumer electronics and AI evolve every year.
Not to mention, drones are getting cheaper to manufacture seemingly by the week. And according to a recent study, these kinds of procurement delays are even extending into America’s efforts to procure drones.
As Col. Neil A. Hollenbeck explained:
“Under the Army’s current construct, requirements for small drones are written in a directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia, which is led by a colonel who reports to a three-star general at Fort Eustis, Virginia. That general, in turn, reports to a four-star general in Austin, Texas, who reports to the secretary of the Army at the Pentagon. The users are in brigades with chains of command passing through two- and three-star division and corps commanders at bases like Fort Hood, Texas, before reaching a four-star general at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who reports to the secretary of the Army. Meanwhile, the acquisition project manager is a colonel based in Huntsville, Alabama, supervised by a one-star general who reports to the Pentagon’s Army acquisition executive (a senior political appointee), who also reports to the secretary of the Army.”
Beyond the delays, the Defense Department’s focus has long been on high-cost, high-capability designers like the MQ-9 Reaper drone.
These are powerful unmanned aircraft, but they are not built to be lost in large numbers—and in a peer war against Russia or China, they would struggle to survive in heavily defended airspace.
By contrast, Ukraine’s success with improvised FPV drones and Iran’s export of Shahed-series loitering munitions to Russia and proxies in the Middle East show how low-cost innovation can easily overwhelm expensive systems.
Even advanced concepts like “drone swarming,” in which multiple UAVs act cooperatively using AI, are still mostly experimental within the U.S. military.
To put it bluntly: America’s rivals are learning what works by doing, while Washington is still writing down requirements, watching, and slowly falling behind.
So, what now? Well, the Pentagon knows it has a problem. Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks launched the Replicator Initiative in 2023, promising to deploy thousands of attritable autonomous systems by 2025.
The program’s budget is around $500 million per year, focusing on small, expandable systems across the air, land, and sea domains—but will it be enough? We’ll soon see.
About the Author:
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society. His latest book is The Truth Teller: RFK Jr. and the Case for a Post-Partisan Presidency.
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