The United States Armed Forces have seen success in recent years in meeting recruiting goals, and even as the Pentagon has pivoted towards instilling a “warrior ethos” culture, it isn’t overlooking the fact that manpower alone won’t win future conflicts. Unmanned systems will also play a vital role, and to that end, this week, the Department issued a call to industry to aid in the initiative to produce around 300,000 drones “quickly and inexpensively.”
It is part of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s effort to meet the “drone dominance” goals that President Donald Trump laid out earlier this year.
In June, Trump signed the “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” executive order, which outlined how the United States “would up its drone game,” in both the commercial and military sectors. That also called for the delivery of massive amounts of inexpensive, American-made, lethal drones to U.S. military units, which would “amplify their combat capabilities” and serve as a force multiplier.
Secretary Hegseth followed up on the president’s executive order in July, releasing a memo titled “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance.” He laid out a plan for how the Pentagon could meet the president’s goals. That included the government partnering with industry to initiate a “technological leapfrog” and arm U.S. military combat teams with the low-cost, American-made unmanned systems.
“Next year I expect to see [drone] capability integrated into all relevant combat training, including force-on-force drone wars,” the secretary said.
Removing Regulations and Getting Industry Onboard
One component of Hegseth’s efforts was to strip away “regulations that hindered the military’s adoption of small drones and shifting the necessary authorities away from the department’s bureaucracy and into the hands of unit commanders,” the Department explained.
Hegseth, who has been critical of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, said in a video posted to social media that it was a “first step in the urgent effort to boost lethality across the force.”
More recently, the Pentagon chief said the second step will be to “kickstart U.S. industrial capacity and reduce prices,” which he claimed would allow the military to budget for unmanned systems adequately.
The newly released Request for Information (RFI) has called for industry input on how it can support the DoD over the next two years in four phases, or “gauntlets.” The Pentagon has pledged at least $1 billion to industry to produce drones capable of carrying out one-way attack missions.
The first gauntlet will run from February to July 2026, during which up to a dozen vendors will be charged with collectively producing 30,000 drones at a per-unit cost of $5,000, for a total of $150 million. Each of these “kamikaze drones” – also known as loitering munitions – will carry a minimum of 4.4 pounds of explosives and be able to maneuver across upwards of six miles of open land.
The next three gauntlets will see the number of vendors decrease to just five, while the number of drones produced will increase from 30,000 to 150,000. Moreover, the Pentagon is calling for the per-unit cost to drop to $2,300.
“Drone dominance will do two things: drive costs down and capabilities up,” Hegseth said. “We will deliver tens of thousands of small drones to our force in 2026, and hundreds of thousands of them by 2027.”
The One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law this past summer, directed $1 billion to fund the manufacture of approximately 340,000 small unmanned aerial systems (UAS) that will be fielded to the combat units over the next two years.
“After that, it’s expected that American industry’s interest in building drones as a result of the program will have strengthened supply chains and manufacturing capacity to the point that the military will be able to afford to buy the drones it wants, in the quantity it wants, at a price it wants, through regular budgeting,” the DoD explained.
Addressing the Changing Defense World
The secretary also noted that, following the end of the Cold War, the United States’ defense spending dropped, but it was also a period marked by significant consolidation within the defense sector. From hundreds of contractors, there were only a few dozen.
The DoD was also focused on quality rather than quantity, which is what it needed. However, the cost of such hardware means it takes years to produce more than a handful of fighters like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, and losing one is a catastrophe.
“We now find ourselves in a new era,” warned Hegseth. “An era of cheap, disposable battlefield drones. We cannot be left behind — we must invest in inexpensive, unmanned platforms that have proved so effective.”
At the same time, the U.S. Navy expended hundreds of millions of dollars in missiles to stop low-cost drones during operations against the Houthis militants in Yemen.
“One of my priorities is rebuilding our military,” Hegseth said. “We can’t do that by doing business the same way we have in the past. We cannot afford to shoot down cheap drones with $2 million missiles. And we ourselves must be able to field large quantities of capable attack drones.”
New Drone Doctrine
Hegseth has also called for a change in the doctrine, notably how the American warfighter will fight future conflicts.
“I will soon be meeting with the military services to discuss transformational changes in warfighting doctrine,” Hegseth said. “We need to outfit our combat units with unmanned systems at scale. We cannot wait. The funding provided by the Big Beautiful Bill is ready to be used to mount an effective sprint to build combat power. At the Department of War, we are adopting new technologies with a ‘fight tonight’ philosophy — so that our warfighters have the cutting-edge tools they need to prevail.”
USMC Adopting Drone Doctrine
It was also this week that the United States Marine Corps confirmed it will begin operating thousands of Neros Archer drones next year. Already, four armed drone teams have been leading the efforts. Although the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) aren’t a program of record, Cathleen Close, spokesperson for the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, told Janes in September that 3,200 Archer drones were procured as a one-time purchase.
Each UAV can reportedly carry a 2kg (4.4 pounds) payload over a distance of 20 km (12.5 miles). The payloads include anti-personnel, anti-materiel, and explosively formed penetrator (EFP) for anti-armor operations.
