China can ground America’s drone fleet with a single phone call. Washington is letting it happen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Zaikin is the founder and CEO of Key Elements Group, a London-based strategic consultancy specializing in defense and international affairs. He has written on defense procurement and drone warfare for the Jerusalem Post, Forbes and Stars and Stripes. He has also been featured in interviews with the BBC, Sky News and CNBC.

In October 2024, a single phone call from a Chinese government office to a battery supplier in Dongguan severed the power source for Skydio, America’s largest drone manufacturer. The company was grounded overnight. That was one component, one supplier, one phone call. Beijing has since demonstrated it can do the same thing to infrared sensors, rare earth magnets, and motors. It controls the chemistry and metallurgy underneath every military drone the United States fields and most major weapons platforms in the American arsenal.

The question is no longer whether China would pull the plug. It already has. The question is whether Washington will do anything about it before Beijing does it again, across every input category at once.

The scale of the dependency is staggering. A December 2025 analysis confirmed what battlefield commanders already knew: Chinese inputs dominate five critical layers of the drone production stack, from magnets and batteries to semiconductors, carbon fiber and infrared sensors. In each category, non-Chinese alternatives either do not exist at scale or would take years to develop.

A separate CSIS assessment found that the F-35, Predator drones, Tomahawk missiles, and Virginia-class submarine propulsion systems all rely on Chinese rare earth magnets. DJI holds roughly 80% of the American commercial drone market. The majority of platforms on the Pentagon’s own Blue UAS approved list contain Chinese-made motors. A disruption to Chinese rare earth exports would hit every one of these programs simultaneously.

This is not a contingency that might materialize. Beijing has already pulled the trigger, repeatedly and with escalating precision. The Skydio shutdown was only the beginning. The company had to halt production and scramble for alternative suppliers, but batteries were one category among many. In June 2025, after China tightened dual-use export controls, infrared sensor shipments to the United States dropped by an estimated 60% and module prices surged from roughly $400 to over $1,500, according to industry sources. In November 2025, Beijing imposed export licensing requirements on more than 20 categories of rare earth equipment, including a provision requiring Chinese government approval for re-exports of products containing Chinese rare earths anywhere in the world.

With that, magnets, motors, and the metallurgy underneath everything else came under Beijing’s direct control.

Beijing subsequently paused those measures for one year under a U.S.-China trade truce, but the architecture remains intact and the clock is running. Each move hit a different layer of the production stack. Taken together, they look less like trade policy and more like a campaign. The same supply chains Beijing is squeezing in Washington, it is feeding to Moscow: NATO now calls China a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war, and a Reuters investigation found Chinese firms shipping engines, control systems and navigation gear directly to the manufacturer of Russia’s Garpiya drones.

Ukraine is the clearest warning of what decoupling actually requires. The country produces five million FPV drones per year under existential wartime pressure and still cannot break free. Official data from the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry puts Chinese dependency at 38%, but TAF Industries, one of the country’s largest drone producers, recently revealed that the real figure is 85%.

Only 5% of member firms in the Council of Defense Industry use zero Chinese components. Ukraine is fighting for its existence and still cannot break the dependency. No peacetime bureaucracy is going to fare better.

Washington knows it has a problem. It is not moving fast enough to fix it. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has announced plans to buy at least one million drones over the next two to three years. Congress wrote the SkyFoundry program into the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which would authorize a government-run facility to produce one million small drones a year. The United States possesses latent industrial capacity in injection molding shops, precision machining houses, and automotive assembly lines that could pivot to drones, but nobody has asked them to. According to the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, roughly 500 American drone companies produce under 100,000 units a year between them. Ukraine produces five million.

Money is starting to move. MP Materials is building a $1.25 billion rare earth magnet campus in Northlake, Texas, that will not reach full capacity until 2028, the same year the NDAA’s Chinese battery ban takes effect. Amprius and Nanotech Energy announced a manufacturing partnership to produce NDAA-compliant silicon-anode drone battery cells domestically, backed by a $12 million Defense Innovation Unit contract. But as has been widely reported, the House Armed Services Committee has acknowledged that the Defense Department’s need for these materials far exceeds what domestic producers can deliver.

And there is a deadline: Starting Jan. 1, 2028, the FY2026 NDAA bars the Defense Department from buying Chinese-sourced battery materials. That is 21 months from now. Manufacturers say it takes 18 to 24 months to qualify a new component. If you have not already started retooling, you are probably too late. Nobody has invoked the Defense Production Act. Advanced market commitments have gone nowhere.

Washington already has the authority to act. The tools are on the books. Nobody has picked them up.

The Defense Production Act already gives the president authority to prioritize drone supply chain components, from rare earth magnets and motors to infrared sensors, carbon fiber and batteries. Title III can provide capital to scale production. Title I priority ratings can move component orders to the front of the queue.

The Department of Defense already has the authority to issue advanced market commitments, guaranteeing purchase prices and minimum volumes for domestically produced components. The COVID vaccine program worked the same way: Washington guaranteed the purchase volume before a single dose existed. Advanced market commitments are what give manufacturers the certainty to invest. That mechanism needs to be applied to every layer of the drone production stack, not just batteries.

The Pentagon could compress qualification and certification timelines from the current 18-to-24-month cycle to six months for components that meet published performance specifications. Congress could fund a drone component stockpile sufficient to sustain at least 90 days of wartime consumption rates. None of this has happened. The United States cannot enter a conflict dependent on just-in-time supply from an adversary’s principal weapons supplier.

Drones have emerged as among the most consequential weapons in contemporary conflict, and NATO has allowed a key adversary to retain control over the supply chains required to produce them. China has spent decades building this monopoly and the last 18 months demonstrating its willingness to use it, one component category at a time: batteries in October, sensors in June, magnets in November. Washington can build the industrial base now, or it can wait for Beijing to shut the whole supply chain down at once.