The Pentagon is working to establish a US industrial base capable of producing hundreds of thousands of drones next year. But if it meets that goal, an important question follows: what should the military do with all those systems?
Drones resemble munitions in the large numbers the military may need to expend. But storing them in warehouses for years is not necessarily the answer. Technology, threats and tactics are changing rapidly, and today’s most capable drones could soon become tomorrow’s obsolete inventory.
The answer is not to use them only in routine training. They should be tested to the point of exhaustion so the military and industry can learn what works—and what must change.
Exercises should consume drones—and test industry
Travis Metz, deputy director of the Defense Innovation Unit, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that military training should consume drones in “the hundreds of thousands per year.” Such volumes could create an opportunity to train not only operators but also industry for a conflict in which uncrewed systems are used heavily and improved rapidly.
Industry should not be seen simply as a supplier. As the pace of technological change accelerates, manufacturing capacity and the ability to adapt quickly are becoming increasingly important parts of military force generation. That means manufacturers need to participate in exercises, not just deliver systems beforehand.
Orders for a handful of prototypes cannot show whether industry can redesign a system, produce it at scale, earn the military’s trust and deliver it in operationally useful quantities. To find out, production has to reach meaningful volumes.
From the first Drone Dominance Gauntlet to the second
The first two Drone Dominance Gauntlets have already shown significant progress. The drones became more capable and reliable, while operators improved as well. The Marines observed during the exercises had developed checklists and common terminology that helped them move quickly from setup to flight.
The test team improved, too: requirements were more clearly defined, scenarios were better differentiated, and data collection and scoring became more sophisticated.
Perhaps most notably, the relationship between vendors and operators changed. At times, they looked less like customer and supplier and more like a single tactical-technical team. Operators knew what they wanted to accomplish, while company representatives could show how the technology might help them do it.
Between the first and second Gauntlets, the entire drone ecosystem adapted and improved. The lesson is that consuming drones at significant scale can simultaneously train the force, inform the next design iteration and create demand for producing that next generation.
Planned consumption can create military value
After the four planned Gauntlets conclude, similar events could be organized for other classes of systems. But the central lesson should become permanent practice: training needs to test the industrial base as well as the warfighter.
Using drones at such volumes will be expensive. Yet a drone sitting in a warehouse can lose combat value as technology changes and new threats and tactics emerge. The proposal is not to buy an additional 100,000 drones just to destroy them in tests. It is to plan to use and replace some portion of the large quantities the military is already purchasing.
A drone consumed in a well-designed exercise can produce a different kind of military value from one stored in a warehouse: more proficient operators, test data, better tactics, exercised logistics and lessons for designing the next systems.
The goal is neither to lose as many drones as possible nor to preserve every one for a future war. The military needs to balance inventory with deliberate consumption so that each dollar produces the greatest possible combat value.
A continuous exercise—from the field to the factory
Several initiatives could already provide the foundation for this approach. The Drone Dominance Program tests both drone performance and manufacturing readiness. Project Flytrap puts emerging technology in soldiers’ hands in operationally representative environments and is already linked to a series of exercises. Major exercises offer increasingly realistic scenarios, while the Department of Defense is experimenting with ways to assess manufacturing readiness.
The next step is to connect these efforts and bring manufacturers into the exercises. In a large-scale scenario, thousands of drones could be treated as consumable, with both sides using uncrewed aircraft and counter-drone systems. Operators would employ their tactics, testers would collect data, and engineers, supply-chain specialists, acquisition officials and manufacturers would track what was happening in the field.
If one side gained a decisive advantage, the operational event could end. But that would start the industrial exercise: operators and testers would assess what succeeded and what failed. Perhaps the tactics worked, but the software interface was difficult to use. Perhaps an adversary exploited a communications vulnerability. Or a sensor, antenna, payload, component or airframe may need to change.
Industry would then have to turn those findings into changes quickly and answer practical questions: Can the system be redesigned? Can suppliers support the change? Can the government validate the modified system quickly enough? Can the factory reconfigure and produce the new version in meaningful quantities? Can logistics deliver it back to the unit? Can operators learn to use the changes?
Not every part of the process will move at the same speed. Identifying those disparities is precisely how the exercise can reveal bottlenecks that need to be fixed.
Learn the logistics lessons before a war
This model would require repeated exercises, conducted at an increasingly rapid pace. One event could reveal a vulnerability, industry could adapt the systems between exercises, and the next event could test the solution.
In that sense, the industrial exercise would never truly end. Each event would become another iteration in a continuous adaptation campaign, tracking what failed, what changed, at what scale, how long each step took and where intervention is needed.
Using drones at these volumes would also create logistical challenges: recovering systems, salvaging usable components, handling damaged batteries, recycling materials and responsibly disposing of items that cannot be recovered. Those are wartime logistics problems, and the lessons need to be learned in advance.
The United States cannot simply replicate what Ukraine has done. It would likely face different constraints and integrate drones into joint, multidomain operations. What it should borrow is Ukraine’s pace of learning and its ability to adapt drones to operational needs.
The decisive advantage: the ability to design and produce quickly
Pilots train by flying, infantry by practicing marksmanship, and staffs through exercises. The reason is simple: the military does not want to find out during a war whether it can perform its missions. If manufacturing and adaptation are becoming more important parts of combat power, the same logic should apply to the industrial base.
The objective should not be to enter the next war with the world’s largest warehouse of drones. It should be to enter with the world’s most practiced system for designing, building and delivering them. Getting there may take far more than simply losing 100,000 drones.
Col. Dustin Thomas is the commander of the Defense Contract Management Agency’s Unmanned Systems–Experimental Command (US-X). US-X provides contract oversight for uncrewed systems of all sizes across all domains and manages the Blue List. Thomas previously led Black Phoenix, an innovation team focused on designing, building and flying small uncrewed systems in less than 24 hours, and founded Game of Drones, an experimentation event focused on rapidly integrating new technology into uncrewed systems.
