WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When a US MQ-9 Reaper drone loitered over Baghdad airport in the early hours of January 3, 2020 and fired a Hellfire missile that killed the powerful Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, it showcased the full force of American drone supremacy.
The strike was precise, distant, and risk-free for US forces, and represented the culmination of decades of investment in large, high-end, unmanned aerial vehicles costing tens of millions of dollars each.
But five years later, analysts say -- and some politicians admit -- that model of dominance is being upended.
The war in Ukraine has ushered in a radically different era of drone warfare, one built not around a few elite systems but around millions of small, cheap, and expendable drones deployed by soldiers at the front.
And the United States is scrambling to catch up as drones become the new front line in modern warfare.
"The United States has one of the most impressive drone industries in the world, but those drones have been often very big, very expensive, with very exquisite capabilities. And yet what we need from the industry in this moment is inexpensive ones in high quantities," said Brad Bowman, a defense analyst at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
"We have really been kind of AWOL in terms of the ability of American industry to produce low-cost drones in high quantity," he added, calling the war in Ukraine a "wake-up call" for the Pentagon.
The Cheaper, The Better
Ukraine is expected to produce more than 4 million drones of all types this year, according to the country's former defense minister, Rustam Umerov. Many cost only a few hundred dollars. Russia, too, is manufacturing cheap drones by the millions after finding it needed Chinese and Iranian help to capitalize on the usage of smaller, less sophisticated ones.
By contrast, the Reaper that killed Soleimani, at 36 feet long and weighing 2,200 kilograms, cost $30 million. The United States agreed to buy 366 of them over the lifetime of the program, replacing the earlier Predator drone, which saw about 270 units produced over two decades.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, much of the US military's drone fleet -- numbering in the thousands -- was built around Predator-era technology and designed for anti-insurgency campaigns.
While the US military leads in high-end drone technology, there are no US manufacturers currently producing cheap drones at scale, according to industry insiders. A recent New York Times report estimated US annual production at fewer than 100,000 units.
For years, low-cost imports from China -- particularly from DJI, the world's largest drone maker -- have dominated the US market, undercutting domestic manufacturers. But that may be changing. After peaking at over 800,000 in 2023, Chinese drone imports are plummeting amid tighter Customs and Border Protection enforcement. The United States is now weighing a full ban on new DJI drones on national-security grounds.
The Trump administration is also taking measures to address the situation.
In an interview this week with News Nation, Emil Michael, the US undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said the government is trying to minimize bureaucratic barriers to production.
"You've got to cut the red tape out" when it comes to drone production, he said.
An example of what the United States may be aiming for was on display in June when Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb saw dozens of drones swarm deep into Russian territory to attack air bases.
Small drones were smuggled across the border and then laid in wait. Ukraine has claimed the roofs of the trucks that were carrying the hidden drone fleet were then opened "remotely" to enable the aircraft to launch, with devastating results.
"This attack should be a wake-up call to militaries around the world," Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, told RFE/RL.
The Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) says there are 235 US aerial drone companies actively marketing products, with another 40 developing prototypes. Many defense-focused firms have announced major expansion plans, but challenges remain, it said.
According to AUVSI, a lack of sustained Defense Department procurement commitments and difficulty sourcing components at scale are slowing growth.
"The No. 1 priority right now has to be scale and speed, but that's really hard to achieve because we've trained the entire national-security enterprise for decades to do just the opposite. It is a dramatic culture shift," Bowman said.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last month pledged to overhaul the Pentagon's drone procurement pipeline and increase exercises with drones.
"Drone dominance is a process race as much as a technological race. Modern battlefield innovation demands a new procurement strategy that fuses manufacturers with our frontline troops," he wrote in a July 16 memo.
Chad Raduege, an Oklahoma-based drone consultant and retired Air Force brigadier general, said US innovation in drone production and tactics will accelerate as the military delivers low-cost systems into units and lets troops experiment.
"Get drones into the hands of operators, let them start training, then there will be tactics that we will evolve as part of the US war machine," Raduege told RFE/RL.
"We are going to see some pretty neat stuff."
