Washington: The Pentagon told US lawmakers that modern warfare is being reshaped by cheap, mass-produced drones, warning that battlefield lessons from Ukraine and recent combat involving Iran make it imperative for the United States to rapidly build a domestic drone industry and arm troops with large numbers of unmanned systems.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, senior Pentagon officials said small drones have become a decisive weapon on modern battlefields and that the US must accelerate production while reducing dependence on Chinese-linked supply chains.
“Drones are the most significant battlefield innovation in generations,” Owen West, senior adviser for drone dominance at the Pentagon, told lawmakers.
He said the department’s effort to expand the American drone industrial base had three key objectives: “First, bolster the domestic manufacturing base; second, arm our combat units and train as we expect to fight, and third, power a technological leapfrog via reconciliation funding.”
West said the programme aims to ensure that American troops are “swiftly armed to fight on the modern battlefield”.
Lawmakers across party lines agreed that the character of war is changing rapidly.
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Roger Wicker said the conflict in Ukraine had “forever changed the character of modern warfare” and demonstrated the growing importance of small unmanned systems used for reconnaissance, targeting, and strike missions.
Wicker also warned that the United States had fallen behind in the global drone market. China, he said, had used “state subsidies in the tens of billions of dollars”, “predatory pricing practices” and control of key supply chains to capture “more than 90 per cent of the global nonmilitary small drone market”.
As a result, American drones have become “anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive” than Chinese models, he said.
Ranking member Jack Reed said the scale of the battlefield shift was already clear.
“More than half of all casualties on the battlefield are now attributed to UAS,” Reed said, referring to unmanned aerial systems.
Travis Metz, programme manager for the Pentagon’s drone dominance initiative, told the committee the department has committed “$ 1.1 billion over the next 18 months to purchase drone systems” as part of a push to scale up production and reduce costs.
“The drone dominance program is the engine to unleash the American small drone industrial base,” Metz said.
He explained that the programme has two central goals: “First, scale US supply chains for small drones, thereby reducing the cost of acquisition and second, supply significant quantities of those drones to the military services.”
Metz said the Pentagon recently completed a 14-day drone competition at Fort Benning involving 25 vendors whose systems were tested by military operators.
“The winners will be given orders for a total of 30,000 small one-way attack drones which will be delivered to military units over the next five months,” he said.
The department plans to repeat the process in cycles every six months, “raising quantities, lowering prices, and evaluating against more difficult mission tests”.
The programme also seeks to put frontline troops at the centre of procurement decisions.
“We have removed the bureaucratic filter,” Metz said. “Warfighters who are the end users will be the primary evaluators.”
Major General Steven Marks, director of the Defence Autonomous Warfare Group, said autonomous systems are already transforming combat operations.
“The character of warfare has fundamentally changed,” Marks told the committee. “Autonomous systems are no longer emerging. They are a reality on the battlefield.”
He said the group was designed to connect operational demands with technological innovation by bringing engineers and military operators together to develop systems directly informed by battlefield needs.
Senators, however, questioned whether the pace of US efforts matched the urgency of the threat.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen said Ukrainian forces were iterating drone designs “every two weeks because of warfare”, adding that it did not appear there was enough urgency in the US approach.
Senator Richard Blumenthal also questioned the scale of funding, warning that “$ 1 billion even $ 2 billion seems totally inadequate” compared with the speed at which drone warfare is evolving.
Metz acknowledged that Ukraine currently produces drones at a far larger scale.
He said Ukraine built roughly 4.5 million drones last year and could produce about 6 million this year, with many costing between $500 and a few thousand dollars each.
The Pentagon’s first purchases under the programme will cost about “$ 5,000 per drone”, though officials said they aim to reduce that price to less than $2,000 as production scales up.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted the growing impact of low-cost drones on modern battlefields, with small unmanned systems increasingly used for surveillance, targeting and precision attacks.
Military planners in Washington and allied capitals are now studying how these inexpensive systems can reshape tactics, overwhelm traditional defences and dramatically alter the economics of war.
(IANS)
