Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the military to increase its production of small drones to meet the growing threats emerging worldwide.
Hegseth released a memorandum outlining the policy on Thursday. In it, he said the policy goes “above and beyond” President Donald Trump‘s related executive order, which he signed on June 6.
“Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” the secretary wrote. “Our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones each year. While global military drone production skyrocketed over the last three years, the previous administration deployed red tape.”
The military’s efforts will have three primary components: bolstering United States drone manufacturing, powering technological advancements in drones, and training with them to simulate what they could encounter on the modern battlefield.
“Drone technology is advancing so rapidly, our major risk is risk-avoidance,” Hegseth continued. “The Department’s bureaucratic gloves are coming off.”
Russia and Ukraine’s use of drones on the front lines has been an eye-opener for militaries across the globe. Russia received hundreds of small one-way attack drones from Iran to use in Ukraine, and the Iranians aided the Russians in setting up their own factory to produce them.
Small drones are hard to defend against and are cheap to make compared to the much larger and more exquisite weaponry in military arsenals.
The Ukrainians carried out a surprise drone attack on June 1 from inside Russian territory, targeting multiple Russian military bases. By covertly sneaking the drones across the border prior to launch, it largely thwarted Russia’s air defense systems.
“I would say it’s a wake up moment now, we’ve been awake, it’s just sort of an eyebrow raising moment,” Air Force chief of staff Gen. David Allvin said in early June. “We’ve always known that hardening our bases is something that we need to do, and so we have that actually in our budgets, to be able to get more resilient basing.”
It’s more than just Russia and Ukraine, though. Israel also used drones in its 12-day war against Iran last month.
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Three U.S. service members were killed and more than forty were injured in a drone attack on Tower 22, a small U.S. base in northeast Jordan near its borders with Iraq and Syria, in January 2024.
Amid the infamous drone sightings last year in the United States, there were roughly 350 drone incursions at more than 100 U.S. military installations across the country.
