A U.S. soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division watches a drone fly over an airfield near Fort Stewart, Ga., in July 2024. The Pentagon plans to launch a $1 billion initiative aiming to deliver 300,000 cheap, lightweight drones to U.S. service members over the next few years. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)
The Pentagon is rushing to catch up with modern warfare — and spending big to do so.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday announced a $1 billion initiative intended to deliver 300,000 one-way attack drones to U.S. service members over the next two years.
“We now find ourselves in a new era,” Hegseth said in a Defense Department statement, adding that “we cannot be left behind.”
The initiative announced Tuesday is meant to kick-start industrial capacity and reduce prices so the military can adequately budget for unmanned weapons, according to the Pentagon.
The program will be broken down into four phases. Each begins with a “gauntlet” challenge, in which service members will test vendors’ products and select the highest-scoring ones for orders from the Pentagon.
A group of first-person view drones approaches a target during a simulated attack at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif., Oct. 31, 2025. A $1 billion initiative announced by the Defense Department on Dec. 2 aims to add 300,000 drones to the U.S. arsenal in the next couple of years. (Mary Jenni/U.S. Marine Corps)
With each new phase, DOD will increase the number of drones it purchases while at the same time narrowing the number of vendors and decreasing the per-unit cost, according to a request for information posted this week.
The first phase is set to run from February to July 2026 and will include 30,000 drones purchased from a maximum of 12 vendors for $5,000 apiece. The Pentagon expects to invite 25 vendors to compete in the first challenge, according to the department’s “Drone Dominance” webpage.
By the final phase of the program, which will conclude around the start of 2028, the Pentagon plans to purchase 150,000 drones from five vendors at a price of $2,300 per unit.
Hegseth on Tuesday called it a “stable demand signal to expand the U.S. drone industrial base.”
Small, inexpensive drones are estimated to account for about 70% of all casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Pfc. Mason Davis, a drone operator in the 25th Infantry Division, watches a Ghost-X drone take off for a mission at Pohakuloa Training Area in Hawaii on Nov. 13, 2025. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a $1 billion initiative that seeks to result in the addition of 300,000 drones to U.S. military stocks. (Jose Nunez/U.S. Army)
Such aircraft have also increasingly become a favorite tool of Iran and its proxies, including the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have used them in recent years to target commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
The technological shift has presented a quandary for U.S. forces, who find themselves expending costly air defense munitions to defend against swarms of the disposable aircraft.
“We cannot afford to shoot down cheap drones with $2 million missiles,” Hegseth said Tuesday. “And we ourselves must be able to field large quantities of capable attack drones.”
In addition to shoring up its own supplies, the Pentagon is investing in anti-drone technology, fielding tools like lasers, signal jammers and artificial intelligence software.
Since taking office, Hegseth has moved to streamline the acquisition program for unmanned aerial vehicles and catch up with U.S. adversaries, who are producing “millions of cheap drones each year,” he wrote in a July memo.
Part of the plan for what Hegseth has called “drone dominance” is bolstering the nascent U.S. drone manufacturing base by approving hundreds of American products for purchase by the military.
