Well, that Hegseth speech wasn’t the only good piece of defense tech news to come out at the tail end of last week. On Friday afternoon, Reuters reported that the US Army plans to buy at least a million drones in the next two to three years, and that they plan to buy 500K a year after that.
In an interview with the outlet, SecArmy Dan Driscoll described the drone acquisition plan as a “big lift,” but one the Army could accomplish. Understatement of the century, considering the Army only buys about 50,000 drones a year at the moment.
“We expect that at the end of one or two years from today, we will know that in a moment of conflict, we will be able to activate a supply chain that is robust enough and deep enough that we could activate to manufacture however many drones we would need,” he told Reuters.
He also said that he wants to rethink the way it sees and uses drones—they should be thought of more like an expendable munition than an exquisite piece of kit.
Hell of a week for all you drone-makers out there.
Own the skies: In case you haven’t had the privilege of scanning the White House’s executive orders page, the Trump administration has a bit of a thing for drones. Back in June, the president released an executive order called “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” which called on the DoD and the FAA to speed up adoption of commercial drones and other unmanned aerial tech.
In July, SecDef Hegseth followed that order up with a memo with the same title (delivered to him by an FPV drone, no less). That memo sought to get rid of the pesky “restrictive policies that hindered production and limited access to these vital technologies,” and laid out a three-part plan for drone adoption.
- First, the Pentagon will “bolster the nascent U.S. drone manufacturing base by approving hundreds of American products for purchase by our military,” including by “leveraging private capital flows.”
- Second, the DoD will arm combat units with “a variety of low-cost drones made by America’s world-leading engineers and AI experts.”
- Third, UAS will be “integrated into all relevant combat training, including force-on-force drone wars,” as part of a broader effort to “simulate the modern battlefield” and “overcome the bureaucracy’s instinctive risk-aversion on everything from budgeting to weaponizing and training.”
Hegseth also called for “new funding lines” for drones and a reorg of PEOs (sorry, PAEs) to prioritize unmanned and autonomous systems. At the end of October, Reuters reported that the effort to revamp the drone program would be led by DOGE. Fun.
Churn ‘em out: Sounds like Driscoll was listening. In Friday’s interview, he said that the Army wanted to partner with commercial companies already building drones and reroute funding being spent on older, more exquisite (less relevant) systems. (Lawmakers have also introduced legislation that would allow the Pentagon to build a facility in Texas that could spit out about a million drones a year.)
There’s also a big ol’ emphasis here on the whole “American-made” thing. Currently, DJI and other Chinese drones account for the lion’s share of US drone imports. Driscoll said the priority here was to make sure that the US could domestically produce enough UAS for any future war. (Cough, 2027, cough).