Army ‘on a path’ to meeting Hegseth’s ambitious drone goals
The Army is looking to buy drones “Amazon-style” and juice its organic industrial base to meet leadership directives for growing the U.S. military’s unmanned aerial systems arsenal, the service’s acquisition chief told DefenseScoop.
In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo on “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance,” which called for approving “hundreds” of American products for purchase by the DOD and arming combat units with a variety of “low-cost drones made by America’s world-leading engineers and AI experts,” among other steps.
Equipping soldiers across the force with UAS is also a top priority for Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, who have launched a continuous transformation initiative and are expanding the Transforming in Contact modernization concept, which includes testing new UAS, counter-UAS, and electronic warfare tools.
During a fiery speech at the AUSA conference earlier this week, Driscoll said drones will define 21st-century warfare and the Army “cannot fucking wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield.”
“They are the perfect convergence of artificial intelligence, advanced materials, batteries and propulsion systems, sensor fusion and much more. They are reshaping how humans inflict violence on each other at a pace never witnessed in human history. They are cheap, modular, precise, multirole and scalable, and we will rapidly integrate them into our formations like they have at the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault),” Driscoll said.
By the end of 2026, “every squad” is to be equipped with “low-cost, expendable drones,” with priority going to Indo-Pacific combat units, per Hegseth’s edict. UAS capabilities are also to be integrated into “all relevant combat training, including force-on-force drone wars.”
The Army is forging ahead to try to meet those ambitious goals.
“We’re on a path. It’s going to take a lot to get there, right? This is a lot of drones. But we need them. And so I think there’s a couple of mechanisms. We’ve got the industrial base that has finally started to flourish a little bit, and so we’ll put some of that in. And think of Amazon-style capability where units will be able to go in and select the drones they want, they’ll have feedback from other users on what’s good and what’s the right thing for them, you know, lay out the capabilities these would have. So think of this marketplace, Amazon sort of stylish marketplace that will allow units to be able to go out and get these capabilities,” Brent Ingraham, the new assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told DefenseScoop Wednesday during an interview on the sidelines of the annual AUSA conference.
“I think the other piece to that is … the organic industrial base that is really the backbone in the surge capacity of the Army. And so, you know … SkyFoundry is something that Congress has asked us to look at. We’ve got a lot of funding in reconciliation [to] go stand up a SkyFoundry. That’s the ability for the organic industrial base to produce drones, potentially through either key components or full-up systems. And you know, there’s lots of opportunities there for … public-private partnerships and all those sort of things to help kind of grow that capacity in the organic industrial base that can then also surge or scale in a sort of wartime effort, like we saw happen with Ukraine, like we saw happen with Israel, or seen happen in the past, where that organic industrial base is the backstop that ensures the Army has what it needs,” Ingraham added.
Hegseth also directed the secretaries of the military departments to identify programs that would be more cost-effective or “lethal” if replaced by drones.
“We’re still working through that. I mean, we have [identified them] in some cases. So, you know, the Army has the Launched Effects program, which is, you know, whether you call it a launched effect munition, a one-way UAS, or one-way attack weapon, it starts to blur the lines with what those are,” Ingraham told DefenseScoop. “There are cases where we have done that analysis.”
Ingraham did not name specific legacy Army programs that might be destined for the chopping block and replaced with UAS.
However, he noted that officials will continue to look at new drone technologies that could replace older systems.
“That’s the whole idea between, you know, continuous transformation, is as we get newer capabilities out there, we let our soldiers start to adapt and learn with them. They’re coming up with new creative ways all the time on how to use these things. Those could replace capabilities or older systems that we have, legacy service systems. And so, I think there will be this continuous learning as we continue to do transformation-in-contact, get new capability out there, we’ll learn what things we can potentially do with unmanned systems — whether that’s air assets, grounds assets, [or] surface assets,” Ingraham said, adding that Army leaders are working to “figure out where it makes sense” for missions to be accomplished with UAS.
