Glimmers of a Drone Solution

Given an hour to solve a problem, Einstein quipped, “I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” When mass-produced drones proliferated in Ukraine, the Pentagon inverted this theory. The problem was immediately identified: our defense bureaucracy could not keep up with offshore production. Year after year we dithered over solutions while adversarial advantage grew.

No effort was made to cheapen, miniaturize, and scale surveillance strikes for our infantry. Binoculars and foot patrols would have to do. Asked why troops drove canvas Humvees into machinegun fire, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, “You go to war with the Army you have, not the army you might want.” 

With few low-cost options today, we fire million dollar missiles at thousand dollar propellor bombs, depleting our high-end stockpile. In contrast, determined Ukraine’s drone production now tops 200,000 each month, with median costs below $1,000. The Pentagon tried to mimic that effort with a program called Replicator, but it reverted to old habits: an opaque bureaucracy produced very few items at very high cost. Our system is designed to wrap hand grenades in diamonds for sharper shrapnel.

The U.S. National Drone Association hopes to similarly spur competition and iteration, providing a battlefield laboratory where emerging tech may compete without bureaucratic restrictions. Currently our military services face laborious checklists to test the latest breakthroughs. The Drone Crucible is a small but important effort to speed cycle, a playing field open to civilians and soldiers wielding unmanned systems of their choosing against one another.

The larger question for the Defense Department is how to fund a domestic manufacturing effort in an industry so dominated by China. At just over 3% of GDP, our defense budget approaches lows not seen since 1940, freezing our legacy portfolio in place. Attempts to reallocate have been de minimis. Reflecting Pentagon paralysis, Replicator was allocated less than .2% of the defense investment budget.

A solution is emerging. Last week, Secretary of Defense Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to study an 8% reallocation, an aggressive and overdue reprioritization that was misreported as a budget cut by legacy interests. The nominations of LtGen Dan Caine, described in his official biography as a “serial entrepreneur and investor,” as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and private equity leader Stephen Feinberg as Deputy Secretary, support Hegseth’s intent to “invest in what wins wars today—unmanned systems, AI, and precision strikes.” If U.S. infantry were deployed en masse today, they would be exposed to swarms of drones without commensurate capabilities.

Our predictive capital markets agree with Hegseth’s direction. Private investments have poured into unmanned technologies, which won’t receive all the DoD reallocation given needs from ships to border. The question is how to convert the sudden civilian interest into combat power. One solution is replicating In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community’s successful investing arm. A not-for-profit, In-Q-Tel funds start-ups and reinvests the profits, realizing a return for the taxpayer. The DoD could run a much larger pilot program for military technology by co-investing with private funds, yielding investing expertise and financial leverage. 

To more aggressively rally our world’s best engineers to our defense, the administration could take two larger steps. First, endorsing the Countering CCP Drones Act would ultimately replace the Chinese consumer drones that dominate our skies with American versions, sparking industrial production. Second, President Trump’s proposed sovereign wealth fund could prioritize emerging defense tech, inviting private capital to co-invest in size sufficient to support a domestic drone industry with the same urgency as President Obama’s $90 billion green new deal, while adding a variety of investing options including equity stakes.  

For three years, the drone problem has been defined in dozens of articles by senior defense officials, frustrated entrepreneurs, and visitors to Ukraine’s battlefields. Early Trump administration proposals contain the solution set.

Owen West served with the Marines in Iraq and as an assistant secretary of defense from 2017-2019.

Nathan Ecelbarger, a Marine, is the President of the U.S. National Drone Association.