By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How to Lose the Drone War

Only a decade ago, the United States was the world’s leading drone innovator, flying Predators and Reapers to target and kill terrorists in faraway countries. But as Israel, Russia, and Ukraine have recently demonstrated in dramatic campaigns, another drone revolution has begun. Where once drones were expensive and remote-controlled for targeted strikes and strategic surveillance, now they can be procured for as little as a few hundred dollars and perform a wide array of missions, from scouting the battlefield to delivering blood and medicine to injured troops on the frontlines.

Militaries all over the world are experimenting with this new generation of drones in every aspect of combat. Israel and Ukraine, for example, used first-person-view drones to attack inside enemy territory. Russia’s volleys of one-way attack drones, missiles, and guided bombs have targeted Ukrainian power and manufacturing facilities. On the frontlines in Ukraine, both Moscow and Kyiv are using small drones as well as loitering munitions to destroy troops, tanks, and support equipment while relying on the same unmanned aerial vehicles to resupply, triage casualties, and identify approaching enemies. These drones are no longer operated from afar but embedded into trenches or smuggled deep into an adversary’s territory.

The United States has largely missed this revolution in military technology. Although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has promised to “unleash American drone dominance,” so far the United States’ drone arsenal remains dominated by the larger, more expensive systems it pioneered a decade ago. New drone programs such as the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) or the Army’s Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance are still in prototype and far from cheap. The air force’s CCA is estimated at $15 million to $20 million per unit; the army’s much smaller drone will still cost between $70,000 and $170,000. Even if the military bought more drones than it currently plans to, it is unclear whether U.S. companies could produce anywhere near the approximately 200,000 drones that Ukraine has been using monthly.

To take advantage of the drone revolution, it will not be enough for the United States to focus on building capacity—more funding, more production, faster acquisition. The country’s civilian and defense leaders will have to more fundamentally question the ideas that have long shaped the U.S. military and its campaigns. The United States’ delay in adopting the new generation of drones is a product of strong convictions that it acquired over the past 60 years of fighting wars: that it could, and should, leverage remotely operated technology to win quick conflicts fought from a distance. The United States believed that it could rely on relatively expensive drone technology to save pilots’ lives, deliver real-time intelligence straight to decision-makers, and enable precision targeting.

Now, U.S. leaders are under pressure to adapt to a new way of war already emerging in European and Middle Eastern conflicts. Other countries’ use of drones is changing battlefield dynamics, meaning that the kind of low-casualty campaigns for which the U.S. drone force is built may well become less prevalent. Before rushing to invest in a fresh wave of technologies, however, U.S. defense planners will need to review fundamental beliefs and assumptions that guided their acquisitions over the last half century. They will have to reconsider the American public’s tolerance for casualties, reevaluate longstanding procurement processes, and wrestle with the different services’ tendency to push for bigger, pricier systems. First and foremost, U.S. leaders will need to articulate a new theory of victory that considers how drone technologies can help the United States achieve strategic success.

 

Tech Support

The modern U.S. military has long sought to develop technology to make wars more precise, more efficient, and less risky—both for American leaders and for the troops they send to war. As early as 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson told his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, to find a technological solution for dangerous reconnaissance missions in what was becoming an unpopular war in Vietnam: “I don’t think there’s any way, Bob, that through your small planes or helicopters . . . you could spot these people and then radio back and let the planes come in and bomb the hell out of them?”

With the advent of the microprocessor in 1971, U.S. drone innovation took off, and the first significant drone capability was integrated into American combat. Lightning Bug and, later, Buffalo Hunter drones flew over 4,000 sorties in Vietnam, performing what the military calls “dull, dangerous, and dirty” missions previously only accomplishable by human pilots. Drones served as bait for air-defense sites, photographed North Vietnamese surface-to-air missiles and prison camps, conducted reconnaissance in poor weather, and dropped propaganda leaflets.

Drones did not fundamentally shift the Vietnam War’s dynamics. But they caught the imagination of the U.S. military by demonstrating how unmanned technology could mitigate human risk. This potential became especially important after the military halted the active draft and transitioned to an all-volunteer force in 1973. Ending conscription deterred future presidents from deploying large numbers of troops and required the armed services to design new military strategies that relied on the force they believed they could recruit. Geopolitical shifts also drove a growing interest in new battlefield technologies: by the beginning of the 1980s, the United States faced a quantitatively superior Soviet military. The U.S. military needed to find ways to outmatch the Soviets in quality to make up for its adversary’s raw manpower advantage.

U.S. leaders focused on enabling the military to fight with a smaller, better-trained force operating new precision-guided technologies. Frameworks such as the AirLand Battle doctrine, a strategy jointly adopted by the army and the air force that called for long-range strikes complemented by highly maneuverable ground-force operations, drew on new advances in micro-processing to see and target enemies from further away. Meanwhile, President Ronald Reagan’s massive increases to the U.S. defense budget allowed funding to flow into satellites, radars, and new “smart weapons” with better guidance systems—all technologies that would become the foundation of the U.S. drone arsenal.

Washington’s quest for drones became more urgent after the 1983 bombing of a marine barracks and the downing of Navy pilots in Lebanon. The Navy invested about $90 million into an Israeli-proven system and purchased 72 Pioneer unmanned aerial vehicles. U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, meanwhile, released a new military doctrine stating that troops should not be deployed except as a last resort. Strategists had faith that drones, such as the Pioneer, could substitute for risky manned aerial reconnaissance missions. In 1985, Kelly Burke, the Air Force’s research and development chief from 1979 to 1982, explained the logic to The Washington Post: “There may be such a thing as a cheap airplane, but there’s no such thing as a cheap American pilot.”

The release of the Weinberger doctrine coincided with the dawn of the information age. The United States had long wished to avoid extended wars of attrition, and rapid advances in digital technology finally seemed to make that goal possible. In the bowels of the Pentagon, a handful of strategists in the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) focused on how new systems such as drones might more fully revolutionize military strategy by detecting and targeting the enemy from a distance to win wars quickly and with little risk to U.S. troops. In a remarkably prescient report written in 1986, a group of ONA strategists envisioned a battle space pervaded by flying reconnaissance sensors and swarming “aerial mines,” in which artillery and manned aircraft could rely on unmanned sensors to automatically select targets.

A drone flying during a U.S.-led military exercise, Xanthi, Greece, June 2025

 

Risk-Free Returns

But these two goals—to mitigate human risk and to optimize battlefield effectiveness—never quite aligned. Since the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. drone strategy has been characterized by a tension between risk aversion and the desire for swift, decisive, technology-enabled victories. During the Gulf War, the United States attempted to balance minimizing risk and maximizing effectiveness by pursuing a hybrid strategy: the air force kicked off the war with a shock-and-awe campaign supported by precision bombs and long-range missiles while ground forces launched a decisive maneuver that devastated the Iraqi military. The war’s success suggested a new American way of war that featured quick, decisive, and low-casualty campaigns.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Congress and the Clinton administration slashed the Defense Department’s budget. Branches of the armed services fought to prioritize their favorite existing weapons programs, leading to investments in big manned platforms such as aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and tanks rather than unmanned platforms or smaller munitions. The defense industry consolidated, leaving the remaining firms with less budget and appetite to dedicate to research and development outside of the Defense Department’s stated requirements.

Despite these constraints, over the course of the 1990s, the Clinton administration managed to build an arsenal of stealth aircraft, long-range cruise missiles, and GPS-enabled bombs. These were the air-war years of low-risk, high-technology military interventions. Clinton’s Department of Defense saw great potential in drones, even if they were not high on any armed service’s priority list. Early in his tenure as deputy secretary of defense, John Deutch established a joint organization, the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, to encourage the military to adopt drone technology. As the office concluded in 1994, “UAVs are a viable alternative as the services wrestle with the many challenges of downsizing.” The first Predator drones, invented by an energy company called General Atomics with no clear advocate within the armed services, flew over the former Yugoslavia in the summer of 1995.

That same summer, F-16 pilot Scott O’Grady was shot down over Bosnian Serb territory. This was an embarrassment for the U.S. military and influenced Air Force Chief of Staff Ronald Fogleman to put the Predator into wider use; he established the air force’s first drone unit in July 1995. Congress supported Fogleman’s efforts. The Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, explained: “In my judgment, this country will never again permit the armed forces to be engaged in conflicts which inflict the level of casualties we have seen historically.” That meant, he concluded, an inevitable move toward unmanned technologies.

 

Narrow Target

Following the 9/11 attacks, Predator and Reaper drones became a dominant feature of U.S. military strategy. Over the course of two decades, the United States bought over 500 Predators and Reapers (at a cost of tens of billions of dollars) and used them to conduct thousands of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and a host of other countries. Commanders sitting in operations centers were able to track targets in real time 24/7.

But the use of drones remained controversial. The systems weren’t cheap; nor were they very maneuverable or resilient. Troops on the ground weren’t fully satisfied. The drones suffered from interference in bad weather and data-transmission lags and were operated almost completely by the air force; troops complained that the air force pilots in charge of drone squadrons were not adequately trained for ground support missions. And many questioned the widespread use of drones to replace human fighters altogether. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States was supposedly fighting for locals’ hearts and minds, but this goal sometimes seemed at odds with bombing them from an impersonal, safe distance.

The only service that ever really invested in drones during the global “war on terror” was the air force. Although unmanned aircraft potentially threatened pilots’ historic role in the service, the air force’s desire to control aerial missions caused it to lead the way in adopting drone technology. Rather than being attached to ground-combat units, Predators and Reapers were operated by air force squadrons modeled on fighter units. Often, former fighter pilots piloted the drones and used aircraft tasking processes that mimicked those designed for manned aircraft. It was no surprise that the United States’ use of drones closely replicated core airpower missions such as strategic bombing and reconnaissance. The army accepted the air force’s monopoly on drones, investing only sparingly in smaller systems, while the navy—which remained focused on big platforms such as aircraft carriers that were core to its identity—showed little interest in the unmanned revolution.

Ultimately, the United States’ narrow focus on using advanced technology to limit harm to troops motivated its military to buy and deploy a certain type of drone: one that was controlled remotely, could look at targets for long periods, and could be deployed in dangerous airspaces. That procurement focus arose out of decades of decisions—about how the United States wanted to fight after the Vietnam War, about the lessons that should be drawn from the Gulf War, and about defense investments during a period of U.S. unilateralism. Two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq cemented those choices.

The war in Ukraine has challenged that force posture. As a result, the United States is now hastening to invest in a wider range of drones. It is awarding contracts to new defense firms and wargaming new drone missions. Defense Secretary Hegseth has recently directed units to buy and experiment with commercially available drones. But these decisions all shoot from the hip, reacting to the way drones are being used on foreign battlefields rather than arising from a strategic plan about the roles they should play in future U.S. wars.

 

Back To Basics

If the United States wants to fight and win wars of attrition—the kind of war in which Ukraine is now using drones to great effect—it will need more low-cost drones attached to combat units that can adapt quickly to counter-drone efforts. But it cannot simply copy the Ukrainian (or Israeli) drone strategies. Before rushing toward procurement, U.S. defense strategists need to articulate a new theory of victory, reviewing the beliefs and assumptions that undergirded the last 50 years of technological acquisitions.

For half a century, the United States built a military based on the belief that the American public would not sacrifice its blood but would be willing to spend its treasure. As the deficit balloons and the U.S. electorate shows an increased appetite to punish presidents for inflation and wasteful government programs, U.S. leaders can no longer simply assume they can throw money at expensive technologies to mitigate their own political risk. At the same time, the belief that dominated the 1980s and 1990s—that unmanned technology would create quicker wars fought from a greater distance—is being challenged. The use of drones in European and Middle Eastern theaters is enabling even closer-range conflict: mines, trench warfare, and civilian targeting. None of these have been at the core of U.S. strategy since Vietnam.

The Trump administration must carefully consider whether the U.S. military should adopt drone technology that enables these kinds of warfare in the context of a broader examination of the United States’ military strategy. Only then can it align the U.S. defense budget (and drone investments) toward clear strategic priorities. In the past, secretaries of defense have successfully navigated inter-service budget fights by transferring programs out of individual services or taking them over directly, firing services’ chiefs of staff, and lobbying Congress to allocate funds for specific programs. Not only does Congress need to make the military acquisition process faster and more efficient; it also needs to enable more bottom-up innovation, allowing combat commanders and smaller units to procure and manage their own drone programs. This will require significant legislative reform on the scale of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which made sweeping changes to the Department of Defense. Refreshing U.S. defense strategy may also require tenacious leadership within the armed services, including the appointment of commanders whose tenure is longer than the current norm.

The American military has been seduced by its operational and tactical successes but has fallen short of maintaining the strategic edge it needs to succeed in the conflicts of the twenty-first century. Without reevaluating the American way of war, no amount of new drones will be able to defend the United States against wars it doesn’t want to fight.

 

 

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