Drones: We Aren’t Ready for the Next War

Originally published at the American Spectator (May 3, 2025)

The future of warfare is unfolding before our eyes—and America is not ready for it. From Ukraine’s battlefields to the Red Sea, cheap, attritable drones are reshaping the character of modern conflict. Yet despite these clear warning signs, the United States still lacks the stockpiles or production infrastructure needed to dominate this new domain.

The urgency to act is not hypothetical. It’s happening now. Today, Ukraine reportedly produces between 50,000 to 70,000 drones per month across a sprawling network of small and medium-sized manufacturers. Russia, likewise, is generating tens of thousands of loitering munitions every month, with growing assistance from Iranian and Chinese suppliers. By contrast, the United States—across all services and at all times—has likely never fielded even 5,000 one-way attack drones in its history.

This is a staggering shortfall. Worse, it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how future wars will be fought and won. Mass will matter more than ever before. In a world where inexpensive drones can achieve strategic effects—hitting air defense systems, disabling armor columns, or striking logistics nodes—the side that can swarm the battlefield with cheap, disposable systems will have the upper hand.

For the U.S., the situation is even more precarious when considering the vast distances and logistics challenges posed by potential conflicts in the Indo-Pacific. In a major war against China, for example, American forces would have to sustain operations across 6,000 miles of contested ocean. Traditional, exquisite systems like fighter jets and destroyers—costing hundreds of millions apiece—cannot be risked casually. Attritable drones, costing anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 per unit, offer the only viable path to maintaining pressure, gathering intelligence, and striking enemy assets without burning through irreplaceable platforms.

Critically, these drones can operate even in degraded environments. Advances in autonomy and visual navigation systems now allow drones to find their way to targets without relying on vulnerable GPS signals. They can be networked, swarmed, and even adapted mid-mission—all at a fraction of the cost of traditional weapons. A $20,000 loitering munition disabling a $50 million air defense battery is not just a tactical win; it’s a strategic revolution.

Opponents of mass drone stockpiling often argue that unused drones will “waste away” or become obsolete. But this argument misunderstands the real value of building massive arsenals now.

At the very least, a drone is a bomb that flies. It can be used in GPS-denied conditions. It can be adapted, updated, or deployed en masse in ways other weapons cannot. And when stored properly, these systems can be rotated, refurbished, and iterated without losing relevance.

Build America’s Arsenal of Drones

America should think big—and think now. A standing reserve of at least 1 million attritable drones should be the baseline goal for the Department of Defense, spread across services, combatant commands, and stockpiles near key theaters. We should be producing 50,000 or more per month by 2026, scaling to 100,000 per month by 2028. Contracts should be awarded to dozens, not just a handful, of American firms capable of rapidly delivering modular, scalable designs.

A vibrant, competitive industrial base is a national security imperative in its own right.

Doing this will not be cheap. Building a reserve of 1 million drones, at an average cost of $20,000 per system, would require roughly $20 billion —a rounding error compared to the $886 billion defense budget approved in FY2025. For the cost of a single Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier ($13 billion), we could buy more than 600,000 loitering munitions. For the cost of a squadron of F-35s, we could field hundreds of thousands of attritable drones that could decimate enemy defenses and deny airspace at scale.

The world is not waiting. China is reportedly investing heavily in drone swarms and autonomous strike systems for use against U.S. forces in any future conflict. Russia, battered though it may be, has demonstrated the devastating effectiveness of massed cheap drones in Ukraine. Even non-state actors like the Houthis are using drones to neutralize billion-dollar U.S. Navy destroyers. The technology is no longer the future — it is the present.

If the United States does not act with urgency and scale, we will find ourselves in a future war where exquisite systems are overwhelmed by cheap ones, where quantity beats quality, and where decades of technological superiority evaporate in a matter of months. It is time to recognize that the era of massed drone warfare is here — and to build the arsenal we will need to win it.

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