The U.S. Army says it now has enough small one-way attack drones to put them in every squad, ten days before the Pentagon’s deadline to do exactly that. What it does not have is enough soldiers qualified to fly them. Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army’s Drone Dominance director, told reporters on September 17 that 10,000 drones are already fielded and another 30,000 are arriving, and that the remaining gap between the Army and squad-level drone warfare is trained pilots.
The same week, a LinkedIn post by DroneSports president Eric Richard declared the solo drone operator headed for extinction, blaming the FCC’s ban on new DJI models and the new Section 232 tariffs for pricing individuals out of the trade. It drew more than 50 comments from working pilots in three days.
The two stories are the same story. I’ve followed the Drone Dominance program since the Department of War issued its first request for solutions in December, and every one of its early winners came out of the racing and hobby scene. That scene starts with a kid and a model airplane, runs through a first camera drone, and ends in a cockpit, a Part 107 job, or an Army squad. The FAA’s own registration data, published this year, shows the hobby end of that pipeline shrinking since 2023. Washington has now made the hardware that feeds it more expensive and harder to buy.
The Army Says Training Is the Squad-Level Bottleneck
The Army has fielded 10,000 small one-way attack drones under the Drone Dominance program and is receiving 30,000 more, a volume Col. Gregory Merkl called sufficient for every squad. The gap he named is qualified pilots: the capability exists in every platoon, not yet one level down.
“Where we still have some work to do, candidly, is getting everybody trained,” Merkl said at a September 17 briefing, reported by Military Times. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July 2025 drone dominance memo set the end of fiscal 2026, which is September 30, as the date for every Army squad to carry small attack drones. Merkl said the training push now centers on flying in a contested electromagnetic spectrum, where the enemy is jamming the link.
The Army has already seen where that training comes from. During Project Flytrap at Hohenfels, Germany, in mid-2025, junior soldiers picked up new small drones in under eight hours while senior officers struggled to work the data and software those drones produce, as DroneXL reported at the time. Col. Donald Neal Jr., commander of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, credited the rookies’ STEM-heavy schooling: “they have a lot of these skill sets already.” The pilots the Army needs are the ones who arrive already flying.
The scale behind that training problem keeps growing. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told Reuters in November that the service, which had been buying roughly 50,000 drones a year, plans to buy at least one million within two to three years. In February he told Military Times he hoped to be positioned to buy that million within 18 to 24 months. Every one of those aircraft needs someone who can fly it under jamming into a two-foot target box. The Pentagon has bet that skill comes from the hobby world: as DroneXL reported in June, the Drone Dominance field is built on racers, hobbyists, and Ukrainian firms, with Neros founder and former racing champion Soren Monroe-Anderson at the front of it.
FAA Data Shows the Hobbyist Pool Shrinking Before the Ban
The FAA’s Aerospace Forecast for fiscal years 2026 to 2046 records a recreational market in decline through December 2025, before any tariff and with the Covered List nine days old. The registry covers RC models and drones alike. Registrations fell and the active fleet shrank for a second year.
New recreational owner registrations averaged 4,782 per month in 2025, down from 5,810 in 2024 and 6,053 in 2023, according to the FAA forecast document. Cancellations and expirations still outnumber new registrants, so the registry lost 2,907 registrations a month in 2025. The FAA estimates the active recreational fleet fell 11 percent in one year, from 1.79 million aircraft in 2024 to 1.59 million in 2025, and it expects the fleet to keep falling until it bottoms out in 2027.
The FAA’s 2025 operator survey shows who is in that registry. Of recreational respondents who identified themselves, 71 percent flew only drones, 17 percent flew only model aircraft, and 10 percent flew both. The model aircraft crowd is the smaller group and the more serious one: model-only flyers reported 141 flights a year and owned 13.5 aircraft on average, against 25 flights and 1.8 aircraft for drone-only flyers. That is the club field, the same place American aviation has recruited from since before anyone called a quadcopter a drone. It sits inside the same shrinking registry, and DroneXL warned last October that the American drone hobby was heading into an accessibility crisis as bans, Remote ID, and a vanishing consumer market converged.
The commercial side is slowing too. New Part 107 aircraft registrations peaked in 2024 at about 11,300 a month and dropped to roughly 10,500 a month in 2025. The FAA’s language is that new registrations “peaked in 2024 and are now trending downward.” Remote pilot certificates are the one metric still climbing, at 493,396 issued by December 2025, up more than 70,000 in a year. Twenty-two percent of those certificate holders also hold a Part 61 crewed pilot certificate, which is as clean a measure as exists of how often the drone is the on-ramp to the rest of aviation.
The FAA wrote that forecast assuming no rule changes. It got two.
Eric Richard’s Extinction Thesis Uses the Wrong Numbers
Richard’s post argues that centralized fleets are replacing the solo operator and that the labor market was already oversupplied. The direction of his argument holds up better than his figures, which mix stale certificate counts with cumulative registrations and treat one small, loss-making roll-up as proof of an industry shift.
He cites more than 405,000 remote pilot certificates against roughly 966,000 registered commercial drones. The 405,000 figure is the FAA’s December 2024 count; the current number is 493,396. The 966,000 is the cumulative total ever registered in the Part 107 registry, not aircraft in service. The FAA counts about 424,000 active commercial registrations at the end of 2025. There are more certificated pilots than active commercial drones, which is a different problem than the one Richard describes.
The real oversupply is in certificates that never get used. The FAA’s 2025 operator survey found 65.5 percent of Part 107 holders flew at least one nonrecreational flight, 26.7 percent flew only for fun, and 7.8 percent did not fly at all. A third of the people holding the credential are not working with it.
His fleet evidence is thinner still. He credits ZenaTech with buying roughly 27 U.S. surveying firms and running 78 percent of its revenue through drone services. ZenaTech’s own filings put the count at 25 acquisitions and 26 locations, with drone services at about 93 percent of first-quarter 2026 revenue. That revenue was C$8.4 million for the quarter, and the company lost $45.2 million in 2025, $18.1 million of it non-cash charges on the convertible debt that funded the buying spree. A roll-up burning cash is a bet that consolidation will happen. It is no evidence that it has.
Zeitview, his other example, does not own the fleet he describes. Its pilot app tells network pilots to “fly your DJI drone seamlessly” through its DJI integration. The dispatch network runs on solo Part 107 holders bringing their own Mavics. In a reply to Vic Moss in the thread, Richard wrote that Skydio has returned to the consumer market. It has not, and Moss said so. Adam Bry’s position on consumer drones has not changed since DroneXL covered his April interview.
Where Richard is right is the price of admission. “That’s not a price increase. That’s a different business,” he wrote of the jump from a $2,200 DJI kit to an American-made equivalent he puts at $11,000 to $16,000. That number is his, and DroneXL has not priced the comparison, but the direction is not in dispute.
Tariffs and the Covered List Hit the Entry Point Hardest
Both federal actions Richard blames land on the hardware a beginner buys. The FCC’s December 22, 2025, Covered List designation blocks new authorizations for foreign-made drones. The Section 232 tariffs in force since September 3 put 25 percent on drones of 25 kilograms or less, which covers every consumer model.
DroneXL reported the FCC’s decision to sweep all foreign drones onto the Covered List on the day it happened. Previously authorized DJI models remain legal to buy and fly, though the FCC has already shown, with an import cutoff on older Covered List equipment, exactly how DJI’s grandfathering could end. The Section 232 proclamation adds a 100 percent duty on drones over 25 kilograms, on any drone with a thermal camera, and on docking stations, with a further 25 percent on components from February 9, 2027.
None of that touches a Skydio X10 or a Neros Archer. It touches the $759 Mini that a 16-year-old buys with summer-job money, passes the Part 107 test on at the minimum age, and flies for a roofing company the next spring. The Drone Service Providers Alliance made the same point to the FCC ahead of the September 2 comment deadline, and Vic Moss dropped the diplomatic tone doing it. In Richard’s thread, Moss put the blame on elected officials and on companies like Skydio and BRINC, with AUVSI “carrying their water in front of Congress,” and called the result a plan to legislate rather than innovate.
Some states are trying to build the pipeline by other means. Oklahoma runs a four-year high school track that ends in a Part 107 certificate, which DroneXL covered in March. Those programs need aircraft students can afford to crash.
DroneXL’s Take
The Army spent a year and about a billion dollars proving America can build cheap attack drones fast, by recruiting people who learned on a $300 quad in a parking lot. Now the same government calls that kid’s next drone a security threat and taxes its replacement at 25 percent.
Data security on drones flown for the military and police is a real concern, and DroneXL has argued for years that the answer is a security standard any manufacturer has to meet, tested and enforced, whatever country the company sits in. Washington chose the other route and banned by passport. The result is a Covered List that treats a Mini 5 Pro as a national security threat while the law behind Blue UAS, Section 848 of the 2020 NDAA, defines critical components as the flight controller, radios, cameras, gimbal, ground station, software, and data storage. Batteries and motors are not on that list. In October 2024, Beijing ordered Skydio’s sole battery supplier, TDK subsidiary Dongguan Poweramp, to cut the company off, and Skydio rationed batteries for months while it found another source. The most “American” drone on the Pentagon’s approved list could not fly without a Chinese cell, and the rule that put it there did not care. A standard that tested what a drone does with its data would have caught a bad drone from anywhere. A ban by country of origin caught the hobbyist, waved through the battery, and never needed a tariff on a 249-gram camera drone with no thermal sensor. The Covered List and Section 232 treat the hobbyist as collateral, and the FAA’s own data says the hobbyist was already leaving. The recreational registry has shrunk every month for two years. The FAA thinks it bottoms in 2027, and that forecast was written before the tariff.
Richard’s LinkedIn post got the diagnosis half right. The solo operator is not going extinct; there are 493,000 certificate holders and a third of them never fly a paying job. That is a glut of paper. What is disappearing is the cheap first aircraft, the foam RC plane and the $300 quad, and that is the thing that produced Soren Monroe-Anderson, Joshua Bardwell, the Ukrainian FPV pilots the Army is now copying, and a fair share of the 22 percent of remote pilots who also hold a crewed certificate. Nobody decides at 22 to become a fighter pilot. They decide at 14, in a Blue Angels flight suit at a flying field, holding a Blue Angels model they could afford. My read is that the fleet-consolidation story Richard repeats comes from a Nasdaq-listed roll-up’s own press releases; ZenaTech lost $45 million last year to acquire 25 surveying shops, and Zeitview’s “fleet” is a dispatch app for freelancers flying their own DJI gear. The talent-pipeline story is the one with a federal agency’s numbers behind it.
Watch two dates. September 30 is Hegseth’s squad-level deadline, and Merkl has already said the Army will hit the hardware target and miss the training one. February 9, 2027, is when the 25 percent component tariff lands on the props and frames the FPV community builds with. If recreational registrations are still falling in next spring’s FAA forecast, the Pentagon will be buying a million drones for a country that has stopped producing the people who fly them for fun.
Sources: FAA Aerospace Forecast FY 2026–2046, Emerging Aviation Entrants, Military Times, Defense News, ZenaTech, KPMG on the Section 232 proclamation, Eric Richard on LinkedIn.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
