For years, the U.S. military has been fielding small drones equipped with cameras that let troops see, for instance, over nearby hills or inside treelines. Now, though, the U.S. is trying to catch up to geopolitical adversaries such as Russia and China, which are using drones as weapons.
The Pentagon has begun a huge push to buy hundreds of thousands of so-called "one-way" attack drones, which can fly to a target and explode. The unmanned devices are the dominant weapon in the Ukraine war, where drones are responsible for about three-quarters of the casualties.
"Both the American commercial drone industry and the Pentagon are years behind the curve in producing and employing drones," said Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, at a recent hearing. "Catching up is as necessary as it is difficult, but I believe we're finally on the cusp of charting a future for American drone dominance."
Indeed, "Drone Dominance" is the name of the Pentagon's new billion-dollar program to jump-start mass production of small attack drones. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last summer vowed that such drones will be fielded to every Army squad by October of this year.
Squads are the smallest tactical unit and usually have six to 10 soldiers.
Hegseth has loosened purchasing regulations with the goal of speeding large-scale manufacturing. And the Drone Dominance program is staging competitions among manufacturers in which troops evaluate them. It held the first of four competitions in February and has ordered 30,000 of the drones selected there. The next competition is scheduled for August, and others will be spread over another year or so.
The Pentagon's goal is to select enough manufacturers to buy another 300,000 next year.
That still isn't a lot by the standards of the Ukraine war, said Kateryna Bondar, who researches drone warfare at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"Ukrainians produce 6 million drones per year," she said. "Of course, that is a country in a state of war. But what the United States needs drones for right now, and really urgently, is for training, integrating them into tactics and doctrine, updating the way the U.S. military fights."
So, think of those 300,000 drones as expendable.
"You can treat them as bullets. Basically, that's how they do it in Ukraine," she said. "It's definitely not enough, but I think it's a good first step."
Pentagon acquisition programs for new weapons systems have been notoriously slow, but the Drone Dominance program is designed to move quickly. Manufacturers are essentially told to bring what they believe will work for the realistic scenarios of the tests, and troops who will be using the drones in the field operate and evaluate the entries.
The goal is to pick drones that can do the job and scale up manufacturing quickly — both to get the large numbers needed and to drive down costs from an initial $5,000 or so per drone to less than $2,000.
Bondar said the Pentagon's drone-buying initiative is a good first step. But just as important is teaching the troops to use them.
"If you talk to Ukrainian military, they would tell you that despite all the cool software, AI, and all this kind of stuff, eighty percent of strike mission success depends on drone operator skills," she said. "How to integrate them, how to actually fight with them — this is something valuable, and it's really hard to buy for money."
Some units scattered around the U.S. military are already doing that training, including the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment out of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Capt. Andrew Cannon is a company commander with that unit.
On a recent day, his unit was on a dusty California base conducting realistic combat exercises to learn how to integrate small attack drones, building lessons to share across the Marine Corps.
His unit was using a drone called the Archer, which was one of those selected for orders after the first round of the Pentagon competition. Not much bigger than a dinner plate, it looks much like the kind hobbyists use.
Among his first impressions of using it, Cannon said, was how quickly the Marines incorporated it into their decision-making, partly because they had already used small reconnaissance drones.
He said the Marines operating the attack drone are enthusiastic about the new capabilities it gives them, especially at distances that are safer to fight at, and with difficult targets such as moving vehicles.
"Ultimately, it gives us lethality and precision," he said. "It gives small unit leaders the ability to apply force in a very controlled and deliberate way and allows us to be very effective while reducing risk to the Marines with that standoff it allows."
The drones, he said, are an addition to existing weapons in the Marines' arsenals, rather than a replacement.
"Definitely, I'd say, a big increase in lethality at the squad level," Cannon said.
Some Senators at the committee hearing spoke of the quest for drone dominance as a watershed moment in warfare and said they were worried about falling behind.
"I question whether our country is sufficiently committed, and the magnitude of this effort, I think, has to be on the scale and scope of what we did with nuclear arms," said Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal. "I think it will take really an effort on a scale that we haven't matched so far."
Meanwhile Bondar — the drone expert — notes that other countries are continuing to advance. For instance, she said Russia, which was already using artificial intelligence to automate how its drones pick targets, now has begun experimenting with fully autonomous systems. They cut human operators entirely out of missions once they've started, and out of decisions about what to attack.
"I'm pretty sure we'll get to higher levels of autonomy with these systems in coming years," she said. "But for now, human skills in operating, in targeting support, communication and software integration — this requires practice."
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
