US Army Plans 1 Million Drone Purchase In Dramatic Pivot To Ukraine-Style Mass Production

U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll announced plans to purchase at least 1 million drones over the next two to three years, marking a dramatic 20-fold increase from current acquisition levels as the Pentagon races to catch up with adversaries who produce drones by the millions.

Driscoll detailed the massive ramp-up in an exclusive interview with Reuters on November 7, 2025, acknowledging the scale of the challenge given that the Army currently acquires only about 50,000 drones annually. “It is a big lift. But it is a lift we’re very capable of doing,” Driscoll said during a visit to Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, where he observed testing of new counter-drone systems and explosives.

Army Rethinks Drones As Expendable Ammunition

The acquisition surge reflects a fundamental shift in how the military views unmanned systems. Driscoll said the Army needs to stop treating drones as expensive, exquisite pieces of equipment and start seeing them more like ammunition—cheap, replaceable, and used in massive quantities.

“We expect to purchase at least a million drones within the next two to three years,” Driscoll told Reuters. “And we expect that at the end of one or two years from today, we will know that in a moment of conflict, we will be able to activate a supply chain that is robust enough and deep enough that we could activate to manufacture however many drones we would need.”

After the initial million-drone purchase, the Army could acquire anywhere from half a million to millions of drones annually in subsequent years, Driscoll indicated. The scale represents a stunning acknowledgment that current procurement practices have failed to meet modern battlefield requirements.

Ukraine War Drives Urgent Demand For Mass Drone Production

The push comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated the decisive role of small, inexpensive drones in modern warfare. Both Ukraine and Russia now produce approximately 4 million drones annually, while China likely produces more than double that number, according to Driscoll.

Driscoll and Picatinny’s top commander, Major General John Reim, spoke to Reuters about how the United States is taking lessons from drone warfare in Ukraine, which has been characterized by unprecedented use of unmanned systems. Tiny FPV (first-person view) drones costing just a few hundred dollars have proven capable of destroying armored vehicles worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Drones are the future of warfare, and we’ve got to invest in both the offensive and defense capabilities against them,” Driscoll said.

SkyFoundry Program To Build Domestic Supply Chain

The dramatic increase in drone acquisition will be enabled through a new program called SkyFoundry, an Army Material Command initiative designed to give the service the tools to quickly develop, test, and produce small drones domestically.

The program aims to reduce U.S. dependence on China, which currently dominates global drone manufacturing. Driscoll’s priority is getting the United States into a position where it can produce enough drones for any future war, stimulating domestic production of everything from brushless motors and sensors to batteries and circuit boards.

Much of that manufacturing capability is currently dominated by China. Chinese drone manufacturers control approximately 70% of the global commercial drone market, valued at $41 billion. More than half of U.S. commercial drone sales come from DJI, the world’s largest drone manufacturer.

Pentagon Pushes Past Replicator Failures

The Army’s announcement comes as the Pentagon attempts to overcome a troubled track record on drone acquisition. In December 2023, Pentagon leaders announced the Replicator initiative, a department-wide effort to acquire and field thousands of autonomous drones by August 2025. However, the program has not provided updates on its current status.

In July 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo in which he said he was “rescinding restrictive policies” that had impacted drone production. The memo removed bureaucratic barriers that treated drones as durable equipment rather than consumable supplies.

Reuters has reported that the Pentagon’s DOGE unit—the controversial efficiency organization founded by Elon Musk before his departure in May 2025—is leading efforts to overhaul the U.S. military drone program, including acquiring tens of thousands of cheap drones in the coming months.

Congress Pushes Texas Drone Manufacturing Facility

U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation directing the Pentagon to create a facility in Texas that could build up to 1 million drones annually. But Driscoll said his aim is to spread funding across multiple manufacturers rather than rely on a single production facility.

Instead of partnering with larger defense companies, Driscoll said the Army wants to work with companies producing drones that could have commercial applications as well.

“We want to partner with other drone manufacturers who are using them for Amazon deliveries and all the different use cases,” he said.

This approach would tap into the commercial drone ecosystem, where companies have already solved problems around mass production, supply chains, and component sourcing—albeit often with Chinese parts.

Funding Challenges And Political Realities

Driscoll expressed confidence there is enough funding for the increased drone needs, noting the Army has already been moving to divest from some older weapons systems. However, funding decisions often require buy-in from lawmakers who are hesitant to cut weapons programs benefiting their own districts.

The political challenge mirrors broader debates over defense spending priorities. Traditional weapons systems built by established defense contractors employ thousands of workers across congressional districts, making them difficult to eliminate even when military leaders argue the funds would be better spent on emerging technologies like drones.

DroneXL’s Take

The Army’s million-drone plan is the clearest admission yet that Pentagon procurement is fundamentally broken when it comes to modern warfare. We’ve been tracking this train wreck for years.

The Replicator program’s spectacular $1 billion failure—plagued by technical breakdowns, interoperability nightmares, and systems that couldn’t perform in the Pacific distances they were supposedly designed for—perfectly exemplified everything wrong with traditional defense acquisition. In September 2025, the troubled program was transferred to a new Defense Autonomous Warfare Group after multiple drone systems repeatedly failed during testing.

Then the Pentagon’s DOGE unit essentially seized control of military drone procurement in October, targeting acquisition of at least 30,000 drones. The irony was almost poetic: Elon Musk’s Replicator program couldn’t deliver working autonomous swarms, but his efficiency team positioned itself to bypass the exact bureaucratic bottlenecks that killed it.

Meanwhile, Ukraine has been running circles around Western defense procurement. Ukrainian forces now deploy approximately 9,000 drones daily against Russian forces—consuming 270,000 drones monthly, which exceeds Ukraine’s domestic production capacity of 200,000 units per month. Yet Ukraine’s rapid iteration cycle, driven by real-time battlefield feedback, has completely lapped the sclerotic Western system that takes years to field new capabilities.

The math here tells a brutal story. Even if the Army hits its million-drone target over three years (roughly 330,000 annually), that’s still only 10% of what Ukraine actually consumes in combat—and only 4% of what China can produce. Driscoll’s acknowledgment that Russia and Ukraine each produce 4 million drones annually, while China likely produces 8+ million, exposes just how far behind the U.S. has fallen.

We reported in October that an experimental Army brigade equipped with approximately 150 drones and dozens of loitering munitions achieved three times the normal enemy kill rate during training exercises in Germany. The results came from using the same consumer-grade technology dominating battlefields in Ukraine—proving the concept works.

The question is whether America’s defense industrial base can actually scale production fast enough. China currently manufactures approximately 100,000 small drones monthly, while U.S. production sits at only 5,000 to 6,000 monthly. That’s not a gap—it’s a chasm. And unlike Ukraine, which built its drone ecosystem under wartime pressure with real battlefield feedback loops, the U.S. must navigate congressional politics, defense contractor lobbying, and procurement regulations designed for Cold War weapons systems.

SkyFoundry’s promise to stimulate domestic production of motors, sensors, batteries, and circuit boards is essential. But here’s the uncomfortable reality: Chinese manufacturers control 70-80% of the global commercial drone market precisely because they mastered the supply chains and manufacturing processes at scale. Building that capability from scratch in America won’t happen overnight, even with unlimited funding.

Secretary Hegseth’s July 2025 memo reclassifying small drones as “consumables” rather than durable property removed critical bureaucratic barriers. Field commanders can now procure drones directly without lengthy Pentagon approval processes. That’s progress. But removing red tape doesn’t magically create manufacturing capacity.

The Pentagon’s new willingness to work with commercial drone companies making systems for “Amazon deliveries and all the different use cases” represents pragmatic thinking. Why reinvent wheels when the commercial sector has already solved mass production problems? But this also highlights the political minefield ahead: domestic commercial drone companies barely exist at scale, which means the Pentagon will either need to build an entirely new industrial base or find ways to work with foreign manufacturers while managing security concerns.

What’s clear is that the U.S. military finally understands it can’t buy its way out of this problem using traditional procurement. Ukraine has emerged as NATO’s drone warfare teacher, with European allies now learning from Kyiv’s combat experience rather than the other way around. The Army’s million-drone plan acknowledges this reality. Whether it can actually execute at the required speed and scale will determine if America remains militarily competitive in the drone-dominated battlefields of this century.

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