By Christian Brose
Thursday, July 24, 2025
‘Ukraine Attacks Russian Air Bases in Far-Reaching Drone
Strikes,” the Washington Post reported on June 1. “How Israel’s Mossad
Smuggled Drone Parts to Attack Iran From Within,” the Wall Street Journal reported
two weeks later. And just like that, the future of warfare has become today’s
headline news.
Both operations followed a similar pattern:
Technologically savvy militaries used large numbers of low-cost,
easy-to-produce autonomous systems to inflict damage on their targets — usually
sophisticated, highly capable, and effectively irreplaceable pieces of military
hardware that cost orders of magnitude more than did those operations to the
attackers. Indeed, in Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine likely expended less than
$150,000 in weaponized drones to inflict a loss of up to $7 billion in Russian
strategic bombers that had taken decades to produce.
What is more remarkable about headlines such as these is
how familiar they have become. Back in 2020, many were caught off guard when
Azerbaijan used low-cost unmanned aircraft and artificial-intelligence-enabled
attack drones to rapidly defeat Armenia’s tanks and other traditional forces in
Nagorno-Karabakh. Now, on a nearly daily basis, Russia bombards Ukrainian
cities with one-way attack drones — effectively low-cost cruise missiles —
mass-produced in Iran. For its part, Ukraine, despite lacking a traditional
navy, has sunk Russia’s warships and pushed the rest of its Black Sea fleet out
of Crimea with cheap, explosive-laden drone boats. By some estimates, millions
of drones were expended on the battlefield in Ukraine in 2024 alone.
The U.S. military has not escaped this revolution in
warfare. Its bases and personnel across the Middle East have been under nearly
constant drone attack for years. Three U.S. service members were lost to such
attacks in 2024. In recent combat against Houthi militias, the U.S. has lost
MQ-9 Reaper aircraft worth more than $200 million and three F-18 fighter jets,
while expending dozens of multimillion-dollar missile interceptors to defend
U.S. warships from one-way attack drones that cost just tens of thousands of
dollars. Years of repeated drone incursions on military bases in the United
States — bases that host billions of dollars’ worth of advanced aircraft,
ships, and weapons — demonstrate how something like Ukraine’s Operation
Spiderweb could happen in our own homeland.
***
The future of warfare is here, now. If we are to rise to
the challenge, new technologies are important, but they are only part of the
answer. What is needed instead is a broader reimagining of how the U.S.
military builds and projects power.
America’s current model of military superiority has
remained largely unchanged since the end of the Cold War. We have organized our
military around small numbers of expensive, exquisite, hard-to-produce weapons
systems. This has reflected assumptions that U.S. policymakers and military
planners have made for a generation. We have assumed that there would be no
enduring competition or conflict against a peer adversary and, therefore, that
the United States would technologically outmatch any adversary on any battlefield.
We would not have to regenerate or replenish our own military forces, because
we would not shoot many weapons, suffer many combat losses, or face the
prospect of protracted conflict. Our wars would be over in weeks, days, or even
hours. These assumptions underpin the development of most current major U.S.
weapons programs, and yet they run contrary to most wars in U.S. history, which
were protracted struggles of production, attrition, and regeneration.
Government and industry, believing that ever smaller
numbers of ever more exquisite and costly weapons would secure military
advantage, went about making these weapons nearly impossible to produce at real
scale — and we are therefore unable to rapidly replace them. Their production
depends on specialized and scarce labor, noncommercial and defense-specific
supply chains, manual and artisanal production processes, rare materials and
subcomponents. Our weapons are military luxury goods. This is why years’ worth
of war games have led to the same conclusion: The United States would likely
run out of critical munitions in the first week of a war against the Chinese
Communist Party.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that, since the
1980s, China, our main strategic competitor, has been hyper-industrializing
while the United States has been deindustrializing. As a result, China now
possesses an industrial base with a production capacity that dwarfs our own in
nearly every area that matters to national power and military competition, from
shipbuilding and munitions to drones and rare earth elements. It has taken
America four decades to get itself into its present predicament, and the
unfortunate but unavoidable reality is that we will not recover these
traditional industrial advantages quickly, easily, or, in many cases, at all.
This is doubly true for the U.S. military. Throwing more
money at our traditional weapons programs and their brittle industrial base
will not create more military power on a relevant timeline — namely, this
decade, when the Chinese Communist Party may try to take Taiwan by force. (The
Pentagon projects that most of its “new” weapons programs will deliver during
the 2030s or 2040s.) More money cannot massively increase our traditional
weapons platforms because these were never designed to be mass-producible.
While we must recognize this limitation, that does not
mean that traditional defense programs and their related industrial base should
be sacrificed. There are some things that only stealth bombers, nuclear
submarines, and exquisite munitions can do. Such military platforms and weapons
will continue to play an indispensable role in future U.S. military operations,
especially in the hands of creative commanders who will devise new and
disruptive ways to operate them. It would be equally inadvisable for the United
States simply to try to replicate what has worked so well for the Ukrainians or
Israelis — or, for that matter, the Russians or Iranians. Those solutions have
been optimized for the shorter-range, tactical realities of battlefields in
Ukraine and the Middle East, not the larger geographies and more advanced
threats that the United States is facing, especially in the Indo-Pacific. The
U.S. military will not deter or win a war against China with quadcopters,
first-person-view drones, tube artillery, and small kamikaze boats alone.
There is a new, different model of military power
available to the United States that is achievable, affordable, and necessary
for future U.S. victories.
***
America’s new approach to military power must reflect the
brutal lessons that combatants are learning in Ukraine and on other modern
battlefields. And it should be based on different assumptions about the
character of conflict: Future wars, like most of our past ones, will feature
large-scale combat losses and require the sustained production and regeneration
of combat power. This requires a different type of arsenal — autonomous systems
and smart weapons designed from the start to be rapidly and cheaply mass-produced,
rebuilt, and replaced. These would be consumable items, not luxury goods.
Much has been made of the vaunted “arsenal of democracy”
during World War II, and for good reason. But that historic exercise in
industrial mobilization and mass production succeeded not simply because of a
large infusion of government resources but also because those weapons were
designed to be mass-producible. For example, the Ford company manufacturers who
managed the Willow Run factory could produce a new B-24 every 63 minutes
because automobiles and bomber aircraft were not wildly different from one another
in terms of their designs, production processes, supply chains, and workforces.
This would be impossible today, because a B-21 stealth bomber is as different
from a commercial car as it is possible to be.
Fortunately, Congress and the Department of Defense are
starting to get serious about the urgent need to harness commercial
technologies and manufacturing practices to create a new arsenal of democracy.
Under the Biden administration, the “Replicator” initiative began mobilizing
industry, both old and new, to produce thousands of small drones. The Trump
administration is going further. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recent
directive to enable senior commanders to buy small, unmanned aircraft without
any bureaucratic impediments could begin to create something akin to a
competitive, quasi-commercial domestic market to deliver the “drone dominance”
he seeks. At the same time, a small number of important U.S. and allied
programs are seeking to deliver disruptive military capabilities on a far more
ambitious scale. Multiple defense companies, including my own, Anduril
Industries, have competed and been selected to build some of these new
capabilities.
One such program is the U.S. Air Force’s Enterprise Test
Vehicle, which is effectively a low-cost, mass-producible, modular cruise
missile that can fly 500 miles with a 100-pound payload. Anduril’s solution,
called Barracuda, is designed around and built with commercial materials,
components, and supply chains. It can be assembled by modestly skilled workers
with fewer than ten tools available at commercial hardware stores. These
weapons will never be as capable as legacy cruise missiles, but they will be much
easier and an order of magnitude cheaper to produce. This could change how U.S.
commanders fight: Rather than expend all of their traditional cruise missiles
in the opening week of a war, for example, they could instead fire mixed salvos
— lots of cheap new weapons paired with one or two exquisite old weapons — that
cost less overall and keep them in the fight longer.
Another example of such an innovation is the Royal
Australian Navy’s Ghost Shark program — an autonomous submarine the size of a
school bus that will be able to launch new, low-cost torpedoes. A traditional
Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo costs nearly $5 million, and a Virginia-class
submarine runs upward of $4 billion. Together, they are an unrivaled military
capability. And yet, at the same cost, we could produce hundreds of Ghost Shark
vehicles armed with thousands of newly designed low-cost torpedoes. Thus the
new and the old can complement each other and enable commanders to put more
weapons under the water to deter China’s massive and rapidly growing blue-water
navy.
New programs like Ghost Shark and Barracuda will cost
billions of dollars, but some perspective is needed. Consider the Collaborative
Combat Aircraft, an autonomous fighter jet that the U.S. Air Force is planning
to buy in the hundreds from multiple defense companies over the next five
years, at a planned total cost of roughly $6 billion. This is a lot of money —
until it is compared with the U.S. Air Force’s budget over that same five-year
period, which is close to $1 trillion. The Air Force will therefore get a
game-changing capability by the end of this decade for less than 1 percent of
its total budget.
New weapons like these are still unfortunately rare among
U.S. and allied defense programs, but it need not be this way. It is not
difficult to imagine two or three dozen more such programs — encompassing
autonomous vehicles of all classes and long-range weapons of all kinds. If each
of these programs had the ambition to increase our military capabilities and to
complement our more traditional and limited defense programs, they could help
establish a new form of U.S. military advantage and the industrial capacity
needed to deliver it on a relevant timeline. What’s more, all of this could be
achieved at an ultimate cost of roughly 2 percent of the current U.S. defense
budget.
America can win the wars of the future. We still lead the
world in the technologies that matter most, especially artificial intelligence.
We have all of the human capital and all the money we need, both in and out of
government, to carry out a change of this scope. In addition to our more
established defense primes, we have dozens of new, well-capitalized companies
that did not exist a decade ago but are now eager to do this work. And while it
is always possible to further reform our defense acquisition, budgeting, and
other processes, U.S. leaders have all the authority they need to create new
defense programs that reimagine and rebuild the U.S. military. We are limited
only by our will, imagination, and sense of urgency. The lack of these virtues
could still bedevil us, as they have before, but our destiny remains firmly in
our own hands.
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