5 ms·

US Army to buy 1 million drones, in major acquisition ramp-up

51 points by breve 1y ago

lysace 1y ago
This field moves so quickly. Is this mostly pork or a strategic "they won't be useful, but building up development and production capacity is the goal" kind of thing? Edit: Foreign perspective: Saab (Sweden) is pitching drones as a service (DaaS?) to Sweden as a way to enable short development cycles, similar to those in Ukraine, while minimizing waste due to purchasing bureaucracy.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  Little of column A, little of column B. The only way you don't see the value of drones is if you were knocked into a coma in January 2022 and just woke up. The US can make good weaponry if it keeps the usual bureaucratic shitheadery and cronyism to a manageable level. Only time will tell if that plays out.
- edm0nd 1y ago
  Companies like Anduril Industries and Skydio are quickly advancing in this field. I think they will be billion dollar companies eventually solely based off their drone tech.
  - slacker7081 1y ago
    Anduril already raised at a $30B valuation
    - edm0nd 1y ago
      hell yeah. they are making a ton of awesome things.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  I don't think it's pork. Drones have proven their usefulness on the modern battlefield, and those million drones probably cost about as much as about a squadron of F-22s. In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones. I do think that they're making a mistake by considering drones as ammunition rather than as ammunition delivery vehicles. Because the next phase of the conflict, after both sides have a million drones, comes down to who has better software. If one side has a million drones and the other side is stuck with traditional military hardware like tanks and helicopters and fighter jets, the side with a million drones wins, just like how in WW2, if one side had an aircraft carrier and the other side had a fleet of battleships, the aircraft carrier won. But as soon as both sides started having aircraft carriers, things like the quality of the pilots and planes started mattering. Same here - once you have drone parity, the side with the better software wins.
  - psunavy03 1y ago
    > In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones. This is not how militaries work. Military forces exist to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. Combat is literally the ultimate team sport. A world full of drones still has a need for F-22s or similar. Just with proper short-range air defenses around their airfields. It's not who has the coolest piece of gear; it's who can employ everything and everyone they have in the most effective fashion to accomplish the goal of national leadership.
    - nostrademons 1y ago
      I don't disagree, but economies also function on tradeoffs. At some point you have to decide whether you allocate the productive capacity of the economy to F-22s or to drones. That "most effective fashion" changes as the technology level of the economy changes.
  - giardini 1y ago
    nostrademons says >" In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones."< Timing! F-22s could destroy drone factories, drone manufacturers' supply chains, factories, etc. A million drones don't just appear in the air battle-ready. And vice-versa. So it boils down to timing and finding the right tool for the job.
- stocksinsmocks 1y ago
  Ukraine could go through 1M drones in 2-4 months. This isn’t a strategically meaningful stockpile. I think this is just to address our military technology deficit and get drones into training exercises and evaluate vendors. I don’t expect the US to ever again produce any weapon systems at scale beyond policing operations.
  - lysace 1y ago
    Yes, if they are capable enough. I get the feeling they iterate very quickly there. Is that compatible with US procurement procedures?
opwieurposiu 1y ago
Ukraine's current drone consumption has been quoted at 9,000/day, or 270k/month. A million drones won't last long in a peer conflict. Most of the drone parts come from china. What we really need is to build our own drone supply chain that does not rely on china.
- echelon 1y ago
  This order should come with a mandate to build domestic manufacturing capacity. The drones aren't important. The manufacturing capacity is. America should be using every opportunity it can to subsidize reindustrialization. Especially for key industries, components and inputs, places where we make our money, critical supply chain items we rely upon, and dual use / defense tech. Everything important. Machining, electronics, chemicals and plastics, pharmaceuticals... It's going to be painful to play 20 years of catch up. But we need to bite the bullet and do it. This is where subsidy and government purchases can really help.
  - Palomides 1y ago
    it's kinda sad to see comments like this implying war with china as some sort of inevitability we only "need" to bite the bullet if we want to make WWIII economically possible
    - fny 1y ago
      This isn't about WWIII. This is about influence, dominance, and independence. The US domestic industrial base is tightly coupled to a China. You need to bite the bullet if you want independence from an adversary and if you want to preserve global hegemony.
    - HWR_14 1y ago
      The best way to prevent a war with China is to be prepared for it.
    - echelon 1y ago
      > war Defense. Peace through mutual respect. Economic stability and prosperity. Self-reliance, resilience, competence. Anti-fragility. I'm not just suggesting preventing a hot war, but also ensuring we remain an economic peer. America can't just "not lose" a war. It needs to maintain its economic growth and comfort of living for its citizens. We need lots of opportunity surface area in the future, and that means making sure we're broadly capable and competitive. Not painted into a corner, feeble, dependent. Playing chess with decades of foresight. I expect China to do the same. I expect that this rivalry will make both of our nations stronger. In the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've been resting on our laurels. Competition will inject a much-needed sense of mission and urgency.
bpodgursky 1y ago
> Reuters has reported that the Pentagon's DOGE unit is leading efforts to overhaul the U.S. military drone program, including acquiring tens of thousands of cheap drones in the coming months. This is without a doubt the smartest use of DOGE engineers I've heard of yet.
- barrenko 1y ago
  I didn't know DOGE survived Musk's exit...
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    Mostly neutered, but still around. They basically took over the US Digital Service and their internal consulting services.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- slacker7081 1y ago
  TIL DOGE has engineers
yanslookup 1y ago
FWIW the Trump family has inserted themselves on boards of various drone companies...
- metabagel 1y ago
  https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/drone-company-stock-soars-appointing-donald-trump-jr-advisory-board-rcna181987 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/drone-company...
  - yanslookup 1y ago
    ah very clever to put them on "advisory boards". All of the influence and insider info and none of the paper trail.
  - jollyllama 1y ago
    And yet, UMAC's down today.
- para_parolu 1y ago
  War can be very profitable
- stevenjgarner 1y ago
  Donald Trump Jr. was appointed to the advisory board of a small, Florida-based drone component company called Unusual Machines in November 2024. [1] He is also an investor in the company and holds a significant financial stake (reported to be worth around $4 million). Following his appointment, the company's stock price experienced a sharp increase. [2] In October 2025, the company announced it had secured a contract with the U.S. Army to supply drone motors and other components, described by the CEO as their largest-ever U.S. government order. The Army also signaled plans for a possible follow-on order for additional components in 2026. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1956955/000168316824008412/umac_ex9901.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1956955/000168316824... [2] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/umac-stock-climbs-amid-trump-jr-appointment-and-meme-stock-hype https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/umac-stock-climbs-amid-trump...
an0malous 1y ago
Still no real explanation for the drone incursions over dozens of military bases and nuclear sites last year (including Picatinny), or the incursions happening all over Europe right now
- GordonS 1y ago
  I think the explanation is European states spreading FUD, to manufacture further hatred of Russia and consent for an escalation of hostilities.
  - yks 1y ago
    Ah yes, those famous warmongering Europeans, attacking Gleiwitz all over again
  - sofixa 1y ago
    > I think the explanation is European states spreading FUD, to manufacture further hatred of Russia and consent for an escalation of hostilities. Based on what? > further hatred of Russia Russia, being an agressor terrorist state perpetrating a genocide on Europe's doorstep, is already hated by anyone with half a brain half following the news. Be it the bombing of children's hopitals or sending incendiary devices via DHL or bombing munitions depots in Czechia and Bulgaria or assasinating defectors with gruesome indiscriminate chemical or radiological warfare, they are well known, well documented, pieces of shit. Did we mention them kidnapping Ukrainian children to resettle and give for adoption to Russian families? Torturing POWs and civlians? Genuinely, they're not even trying not to be comically evil. Whatever heinous act you can think of, they've probably done it as an official state sanctioned policy. Why would European states need to invent stuff - and note, nobody has said that it was Russian drones, a ship was impounded and its crew arrested off France for failing to provide documentation, and there have been hints it's suspected of being the drone launch platform that impacted Copehnagen Airport, but nothing has been officially said - when there is so much shit, which is publicly documented and widely accepted? We know they tried to kidnap journalists, assasinated people all over Europe, etc etc etc. If European countries wanted to respond more heavily, most of the population would be for and the main argument against would be the fact that the terrorist state has nuclear weapons, which drastically complicats the equation. If they didn't have them, things would have been so much simpler and better for everyone.
nharada 1y ago
I think the way China approached this is probably the better way -- heavily support companies in the commercial sector that can quickly iterate, invest heavily to improve the tech, and scale up manufacturing. They'll always have the latest and greatest since they need to be on the edge for consumer tech, and if a conflict begins they can just produce some extras or worst case shift all production to defense. For the US, which has effectively zero consumer drone companies, we must massively subsidize defense-specific drone manufacturers to keep them up to date, build millions of basically useless military drones that quickly become outdated unless there's actual war, and fail to control our own supply chain in the event Chinese parts are cut off.
- lm28469 1y ago
  > we must massively subsidize defense-specific (drone) manufacturers That's a feature not a bug, it's called the military-industrial complex, some people benefit from it, a lot
  - energy123 1y ago
    This misses a very important point, which is that civilian manufacturing can be pivoted easily to defense manufacturing during wartime. Absent civilian manufacturing, you have no choice but to invest in dedicated defense manufacturing, which is not useful in peacetime (beyond deterrence). The deindustrialization that creates this reality has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. They benefit from it but they didn't create the context.
- jfengel 1y ago
  The US often funds military companies with the goal of consumer spin-offs. The aerospace majors are similar. The inversion of state capitalism vs free markets here is amusing.
- eftychis 1y ago
  That's what the U.S. army used to do, and why they invested in the Silicon Valley. [1] Also a lot of research grants still flow out of the DoD. [1]https://responsiblestatecraft.org/silicon-valley/ https://responsiblestatecraft.org/silicon-valley/
fennecfoxy 1y ago
1 million *overpriced drones. Ah, military contracts. Hilarious when someone with decent maker experience can plug shit together in a shed to easily make a hunter-killer drone these days. Just missing the explosives. The war in Ukraine has proved that even basic commercial drones work very well with an explosive practically duct taped to them. There's certainly the issue of "military equipment gets more extensive testing", but capitalism has answered that somewhat; defective products are extremely bad for corporations and I do wonder if the failure rate of modern electronics approaches that of some military hardware specs (though not necessarily in ruggedness).
- lysace 1y ago
  > The war in Ukraine has proved that even basic commercial drones work very well with an explosive practically duct taped to them. That was like 18 months ago. Since then both sides have been forced to iterate at an insane speed.
doe88 1y ago
The real breakthrough would be to build the capacity of building something at scale just in time instead of allocating big contracts to build or maintain an industry even if not needed at a given moment. A pipe dream of course. Moreover i fear these hardware (smaller in size, and with technologies evolving quickly) become obsolete sooner and are harder to upgrade to new standard (than say a F-35 - sic), and at scale.
biophysboy 1y ago
I regularly see comments on HN that worry about how our output is lower than China. Their population is 4x ours. They have long used financial repression to encourage industrial development. The incentives toward overcapacity, price wars, and domestic competition are so strong that they are actively trying to curtail it. Why should I endorse a defense strategy that is guaranteed to enrich ideologues in Silicon Valley, but not likely to achieve anything else? A million drones is a rounding error in China. Increasing this number by orders of magnitude would require the state administering some pretty big pills, which I doubt the average American would want to swallow.
mikewarot 1y ago
This isn't enough drones. Instead of treating them as consumables, we're repeating the mistakes of Germany in WW2, with an emphasis on quality over quantity, resulting in neither. If they can't produce a million per month, we're going to lose any actual war.
jrs235 1y ago
Trump's son started a drone company a few weeks back... The velocity of the grift will pick up.

51 points by breve 1y ago

This field moves so quickly. Is this mostly pork or a strategic "they won't be useful, but building up development and production capacity is the goal" kind of thing? Edit: Foreign perspective: Saab (Sweden) is pitching drones as a service (DaaS?) to Sweden as a way to enable short development cycles, similar to those in Ukraine, while minimizing waste due to purchasing bureaucracy.

lenerdenator 1y ago
Little of column A, little of column B. The only way you don't see the value of drones is if you were knocked into a coma in January 2022 and just woke up. The US can make good weaponry if it keeps the usual bureaucratic shitheadery and cronyism to a manageable level. Only time will tell if that plays out.
edm0nd 1y ago
Companies like Anduril Industries and Skydio are quickly advancing in this field. I think they will be billion dollar companies eventually solely based off their drone tech.
- slacker7081 1y ago
  Anduril already raised at a $30B valuation
  - edm0nd 1y ago
    hell yeah. they are making a ton of awesome things.
nostrademons 1y ago
I don't think it's pork. Drones have proven their usefulness on the modern battlefield, and those million drones probably cost about as much as about a squadron of F-22s. In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones. I do think that they're making a mistake by considering drones as ammunition rather than as ammunition delivery vehicles. Because the next phase of the conflict, after both sides have a million drones, comes down to who has better software. If one side has a million drones and the other side is stuck with traditional military hardware like tanks and helicopters and fighter jets, the side with a million drones wins, just like how in WW2, if one side had an aircraft carrier and the other side had a fleet of battleships, the aircraft carrier won. But as soon as both sides started having aircraft carriers, things like the quality of the pilots and planes started mattering. Same here - once you have drone parity, the side with the better software wins.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  > In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones. This is not how militaries work. Military forces exist to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses. Combat is literally the ultimate team sport. A world full of drones still has a need for F-22s or similar. Just with proper short-range air defenses around their airfields. It's not who has the coolest piece of gear; it's who can employ everything and everyone they have in the most effective fashion to accomplish the goal of national leadership.
  - nostrademons 1y ago
    I don't disagree, but economies also function on tradeoffs. At some point you have to decide whether you allocate the productive capacity of the economy to F-22s or to drones. That "most effective fashion" changes as the technology level of the economy changes.
- giardini 1y ago
  nostrademons says >" In a battle between a million drones and 10 F-22s, I'd bet on the drones."< Timing! F-22s could destroy drone factories, drone manufacturers' supply chains, factories, etc. A million drones don't just appear in the air battle-ready. And vice-versa. So it boils down to timing and finding the right tool for the job.
stocksinsmocks 1y ago
Ukraine could go through 1M drones in 2-4 months. This isn’t a strategically meaningful stockpile. I think this is just to address our military technology deficit and get drones into training exercises and evaluate vendors. I don’t expect the US to ever again produce any weapon systems at scale beyond policing operations.
- lysace 1y ago
  Yes, if they are capable enough. I get the feeling they iterate very quickly there. Is that compatible with US procurement procedures?

opwieurposiu 1y ago

Ukraine's current drone consumption has been quoted at 9,000/day, or 270k/month. A million drones won't last long in a peer conflict. Most of the drone parts come from china. What we really need is to build our own drone supply chain that does not rely on china.

echelon 1y ago
This order should come with a mandate to build domestic manufacturing capacity. The drones aren't important. The manufacturing capacity is. America should be using every opportunity it can to subsidize reindustrialization. Especially for key industries, components and inputs, places where we make our money, critical supply chain items we rely upon, and dual use / defense tech. Everything important. Machining, electronics, chemicals and plastics, pharmaceuticals... It's going to be painful to play 20 years of catch up. But we need to bite the bullet and do it. This is where subsidy and government purchases can really help.
- Palomides 1y ago
  it's kinda sad to see comments like this implying war with china as some sort of inevitability we only "need" to bite the bullet if we want to make WWIII economically possible
  - fny 1y ago
    This isn't about WWIII. This is about influence, dominance, and independence. The US domestic industrial base is tightly coupled to a China. You need to bite the bullet if you want independence from an adversary and if you want to preserve global hegemony.
  - HWR_14 1y ago
    The best way to prevent a war with China is to be prepared for it.
  - echelon 1y ago
    > war Defense. Peace through mutual respect. Economic stability and prosperity. Self-reliance, resilience, competence. Anti-fragility. I'm not just suggesting preventing a hot war, but also ensuring we remain an economic peer. America can't just "not lose" a war. It needs to maintain its economic growth and comfort of living for its citizens. We need lots of opportunity surface area in the future, and that means making sure we're broadly capable and competitive. Not painted into a corner, feeble, dependent. Playing chess with decades of foresight. I expect China to do the same. I expect that this rivalry will make both of our nations stronger. In the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've been resting on our laurels. Competition will inject a much-needed sense of mission and urgency.

bpodgursky 1y ago

> Reuters has reported that the Pentagon's DOGE unit is leading efforts to overhaul the U.S. military drone program, including acquiring tens of thousands of cheap drones in the coming months. This is without a doubt the smartest use of DOGE engineers I've heard of yet.

barrenko 1y ago
I didn't know DOGE survived Musk's exit...
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  Mostly neutered, but still around. They basically took over the US Digital Service and their internal consulting services.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
slacker7081 1y ago
TIL DOGE has engineers

yanslookup 1y ago

FWIW the Trump family has inserted themselves on boards of various drone companies...

metabagel 1y ago
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/drone-company-stock-soars-appointing-donald-trump-jr-advisory-board-rcna181987 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/drone-company...
- yanslookup 1y ago
  ah very clever to put them on "advisory boards". All of the influence and insider info and none of the paper trail.
- jollyllama 1y ago
  And yet, UMAC's down today.
para_parolu 1y ago
War can be very profitable
stevenjgarner 1y ago
Donald Trump Jr. was appointed to the advisory board of a small, Florida-based drone component company called Unusual Machines in November 2024. [1] He is also an investor in the company and holds a significant financial stake (reported to be worth around $4 million). Following his appointment, the company's stock price experienced a sharp increase. [2] In October 2025, the company announced it had secured a contract with the U.S. Army to supply drone motors and other components, described by the CEO as their largest-ever U.S. government order. The Army also signaled plans for a possible follow-on order for additional components in 2026. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1956955/000168316824008412/umac_ex9901.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1956955/000168316824... [2] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/umac-stock-climbs-amid-trump-jr-appointment-and-meme-stock-hype https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/umac-stock-climbs-amid-trump...

an0malous 1y ago

Still no real explanation for the drone incursions over dozens of military bases and nuclear sites last year (including Picatinny), or the incursions happening all over Europe right now

GordonS 1y ago
I think the explanation is European states spreading FUD, to manufacture further hatred of Russia and consent for an escalation of hostilities.
- yks 1y ago
  Ah yes, those famous warmongering Europeans, attacking Gleiwitz all over again
- sofixa 1y ago
  > I think the explanation is European states spreading FUD, to manufacture further hatred of Russia and consent for an escalation of hostilities. Based on what? > further hatred of Russia Russia, being an agressor terrorist state perpetrating a genocide on Europe's doorstep, is already hated by anyone with half a brain half following the news. Be it the bombing of children's hopitals or sending incendiary devices via DHL or bombing munitions depots in Czechia and Bulgaria or assasinating defectors with gruesome indiscriminate chemical or radiological warfare, they are well known, well documented, pieces of shit. Did we mention them kidnapping Ukrainian children to resettle and give for adoption to Russian families? Torturing POWs and civlians? Genuinely, they're not even trying not to be comically evil. Whatever heinous act you can think of, they've probably done it as an official state sanctioned policy. Why would European states need to invent stuff - and note, nobody has said that it was Russian drones, a ship was impounded and its crew arrested off France for failing to provide documentation, and there have been hints it's suspected of being the drone launch platform that impacted Copehnagen Airport, but nothing has been officially said - when there is so much shit, which is publicly documented and widely accepted? We know they tried to kidnap journalists, assasinated people all over Europe, etc etc etc. If European countries wanted to respond more heavily, most of the population would be for and the main argument against would be the fact that the terrorist state has nuclear weapons, which drastically complicats the equation. If they didn't have them, things would have been so much simpler and better for everyone.

nharada 1y ago

I think the way China approached this is probably the better way -- heavily support companies in the commercial sector that can quickly iterate, invest heavily to improve the tech, and scale up manufacturing. They'll always have the latest and greatest since they need to be on the edge for consumer tech, and if a conflict begins they can just produce some extras or worst case shift all production to defense. For the US, which has effectively zero consumer drone companies, we must massively subsidize defense-specific drone manufacturers to keep them up to date, build millions of basically useless military drones that quickly become outdated unless there's actual war, and fail to control our own supply chain in the event Chinese parts are cut off.

lm28469 1y ago
> we must massively subsidize defense-specific (drone) manufacturers That's a feature not a bug, it's called the military-industrial complex, some people benefit from it, a lot
- energy123 1y ago
  This misses a very important point, which is that civilian manufacturing can be pivoted easily to defense manufacturing during wartime. Absent civilian manufacturing, you have no choice but to invest in dedicated defense manufacturing, which is not useful in peacetime (beyond deterrence). The deindustrialization that creates this reality has nothing to do with the military-industrial complex. They benefit from it but they didn't create the context.
jfengel 1y ago
The US often funds military companies with the goal of consumer spin-offs. The aerospace majors are similar. The inversion of state capitalism vs free markets here is amusing.
eftychis 1y ago
That's what the U.S. army used to do, and why they invested in the Silicon Valley. [1] Also a lot of research grants still flow out of the DoD. [1]https://responsiblestatecraft.org/silicon-valley/ https://responsiblestatecraft.org/silicon-valley/

fennecfoxy 1y ago

1 million *overpriced drones. Ah, military contracts. Hilarious when someone with decent maker experience can plug shit together in a shed to easily make a hunter-killer drone these days. Just missing the explosives. The war in Ukraine has proved that even basic commercial drones work very well with an explosive practically duct taped to them. There's certainly the issue of "military equipment gets more extensive testing", but capitalism has answered that somewhat; defective products are extremely bad for corporations and I do wonder if the failure rate of modern electronics approaches that of some military hardware specs (though not necessarily in ruggedness).

lysace 1y ago
> The war in Ukraine has proved that even basic commercial drones work very well with an explosive practically duct taped to them. That was like 18 months ago. Since then both sides have been forced to iterate at an insane speed.

doe88 1y ago

The real breakthrough would be to build the capacity of building something at scale just in time instead of allocating big contracts to build or maintain an industry even if not needed at a given moment. A pipe dream of course. Moreover i fear these hardware (smaller in size, and with technologies evolving quickly) become obsolete sooner and are harder to upgrade to new standard (than say a F-35 - sic), and at scale.

biophysboy 1y ago

I regularly see comments on HN that worry about how our output is lower than China. Their population is 4x ours. They have long used financial repression to encourage industrial development. The incentives toward overcapacity, price wars, and domestic competition are so strong that they are actively trying to curtail it. Why should I endorse a defense strategy that is guaranteed to enrich ideologues in Silicon Valley, but not likely to achieve anything else? A million drones is a rounding error in China. Increasing this number by orders of magnitude would require the state administering some pretty big pills, which I doubt the average American would want to swallow.

mikewarot 1y ago

This isn't enough drones. Instead of treating them as consumables, we're repeating the mistakes of Germany in WW2, with an emphasis on quality over quantity, resulting in neither. If they can't produce a million per month, we're going to lose any actual war.

jrs235 1y ago

Trump's son started a drone company a few weeks back... The velocity of the grift will pick up.