While no one knows when or where the next major war will break out, what is becoming clear is that next time the United States engages directly in a conflict, U.S. combat units will be sharing their battle space with a different type of force — drones, lots of them.
In a push for the world's most powerful military to “meet the demands of 21st-century warfighting,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Pentagon to fast-track the adoption and boost the number of various small drones deployed across the force, treating them as “consumable or expendable” capabilities similar to bullets, hand grenades and other munitions.
The new initiative aims to ramp up the production, experimentation and fielding of small unmanned systems weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms). This includes one-way, “kamikaze” attack drones and loitering munitions to maintain “battlefield superiority” as Washington’s geopolitical and technological rivalry with Beijing intensifies.
“U.S. units are not outfitted with the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires,” Hegseth wrote in a memo signed earlier this month as he unveiled a near-term plan to “unleash U.S. military drone dominance” and drastically boost the force’s drone arsenal.
The goal is to equip every squad with low-cost, expendable drones by the end of 2026, with Indo-Pacific combat units prioritized.
To speed up the process, the Pentagon chief ordered the removal of “restrictive” internal policies that “overregulate” the procurement, testing, training and fielding of such systems.
“While global military drone production skyrocketed over the last three years, the previous administration deployed red tape,” he claimed, in a jab at the administration of former President Joe Biden.
Stacie Pettyjohn, defense program director at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), said that the latest changes will “dramatically reduce” the red tape that has made it difficult to purchase, operate, train and incorporate small drones into the military.
“This is not an ethical or moral issue but rather changing the way that small drones are categorized so that they can be rapidly purchased, fielded in small batches and easily and frequently updated,” she said.
A chronic problem for U.S. ground forces has been that they are asked to account for their drones in much the same way they would with expensive, high-end systems such as helicopters. This has made it difficult to conduct rapid experimentation and training with drones.
To solve this, the revisions simplify the purchase of small drones by circumventing the ponderous acquisition process used for large weapon systems while empowering field grade officers such as captains and colonels to buy, train and experiment with drones, Pettyjohn added.
Existing test, evaluation and certification processes will also be sped up, while training requirements for small drone operators will be reduced, as will regulations on where small drones can be flown in the U.S., she said.
Drone training ranges will also be established and incorporated into large-scale exercises.
Besides putting these systems more easily into warfighters’ hands, the initiative has two other key objectives.
One is to bolster the U.S. drone industry by purchasing locally made systems and parts with help from industry's private capital, in line with a June 6 executive order by President Donald Trump.
The other is to use the new tech to train in “more realistic” and less risk-averse battlefield scenarios, with Hegseth saying that he expects to see this capability integrated into all relevant combat training by next year, including “force-on-force drone wars.”
Eric Heginbotham, a security scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, said that most of the eased regulations focus on who can make procurement decisions and how.
There is no mention of changes to the autonomy or human control of drones. This is important since any autonomous weapon systems developed and fielded through the new drone initiative would still have to undergo rigorous testing and comply with Pentagon policy.
“The memo pushes some procurement authority down to lower levels while easing the path for various drones and subsystems to be placed on a list that exempts them from certain kinds of reviews,” he said.
Experts say that the significance of these changes is that they ease regulations that were prone to slowing the procurement cycle considerably and at times added considerable cost while producing marginal benefits in order to address niche conditions.
Moreover, drone technology is changing so quickly that the Pentagon’s minimum two-year acquisition process ”guarantees that drones provided to warfighters through this traditional acquisition pathway are already obsolete,” said CNAS’s Pettyjohn.
But one key question is whether defense budget dollars will support the implementation of Hegseth’s memo, which was vague on funding. It said only that “investment methods” outlined in Trump’s recent executive order “are being investigated.”
A spokesperson later mentioned “leveraging” Pentagon savings from the Department of Government Efficiency but provided no further details. Funding will be crucial, as the initiative will require the military services to substantially increase investments in drone systems.
Financing aside, instead of breaking with the past, analysts view Hegseth’s initiative rather as an expansion of Biden-era measures. They say that the Pentagon was already moving toward these changes, regardless of the president, given the growing importance of these capabilities and the need to swiftly scale experimentation and fielding.
Wars in Ukraine and elsewhere have put a particular focus on the increasingly capable systems, and the Pentagon has been seeking to streamline the procurement process for these drones, which can act as force multipliers, minimize human losses and operate continuously for long periods.
“This was true under the Biden administration, and we can see that (Hegseth’s) memo is the current administration’s first bid to take this further,” Heginbotham said.
For example, in 2021, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks updated the rules for the procurement and operation of drones, allowing the Pentagon to employ commercially developed systems more freely.
But Hicks’ biggest step in this field was arguably the 2023 launch of “Replicator,” an initiative focused on rapidly fielding thousands of cheap, smart and autonomous drones across multiple domains to counter China’s military advantage in personnel and manned equipment and deter a potential invasion of Taiwan.
Michael Horowitz, who served as the Pentagon’s first-ever deputy assistant defense secretary for force development and emerging capabilities, said Hegseth’s new initiative builds on both Replicator and the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve — a program designed to accelerate new capability developments that address urgent military needs — although it is not linked to either in the memo.
“Whether the Pentagon continues Replicator in name or not isn’t entirely clear,” Horowitz told The Japan Times, but Replicator demonstrated that “attritable, autonomous drone capabilities across multiple domains are ready to scale and field in the Indo-Pacific today, not a decade from now.
“What we need is more systems fielded quickly,” he added. “The technology is ready.”
Yet, unlike the latest initiative, which is primarily aimed at ground forces, Replicator was more heavily oriented toward systems relevant to the Indo-Pacific, specifically both shorter and longer-range systems that would have the range and capability to make themselves felt across the theater.
This has impacted how the Pentagon, and especially Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. Samuel Paparo, think about drone capabilities, with the latter imagining short-, mid- and long-range drones being used to create a “hellscape” that would make it nearly impossible for China’s military to cross the Taiwan Strait.
At the same time, this also means the latest initiative is unlikely to dramatically change the way the U.S. military would fight China, since most of the changes apply to drones that are too short range to be useful, except for short-range strikes or tactical surveillance.
The main way that it could impact the Indo-Pacific is by boosting the currently anemic U.S. drone industry and potentially providing an alternate and trusted supplier of small drones for allies and partners, like Japan, Taiwan and Australia, said Pettyjohn.
“Small drones could significantly augment asymmetric defensive or porcupine strategies for front-line partners and allies,“ she said.
Indeed, given the way small drones are more likely to be modified from off-the-shelf commercial products and use more open software architectures, Horowitz called them “ideal capabilities for the Pentagon to work on with allies and partners, including co-production and sustainment.”
This will be important for the U.S. since China dominates the small, commercial drone industry, something experts say is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Still, they see room for rapid growth as the U.S. aerospace industry is equally dominant in the domain of human flight.
“You already see startups tackling the issue of midrange drones,” Heginbotham said.
“I would guess that the United States will do quite well, though there is also clearly room for actors coming from many other countries.”
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