Dear Fellow Beltway Exiles,
I’m spending much of the summer thousands of miles from home. That makes it easy to forget just how weird my hometown is. This week I was treated to a reminder of this DC goofiness, with a very strange video and memo featuring Pete Hegseth announcing a new DoD drone policy. Quoth the SecDef, “I am rescinding restrictive policies that hindered production and limited access to these vital technologies, unleashing the combined potential of American manufacturing and warfighter ingenuity. I am delegating authorities to procure and operate drones from the bureaucracy to our warfighters.”
Nothing like the delegation of authority to authorities to get DC wheels moving. But I have many comments and questions about this initiative:
1. This initiative, and this video, make a lot of sense if we are living in 1999. But that’s the drill: anyone hyping new technologies pretends that technological antecedents didn’t exist (see also eVTOLs, Air Taxis, Segway, and any communications app). For a history of the early days of drones, read Richard Whittle‘s excellent Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. It explains the early days of drone technology and drone usage maturation. Quite a lot has happened in the quarter century since then, including the steady dissemination of drone technology down to the tactical unit level.
2. Much smaller battlefield drones are newer, and most of what we know about their utility and tactics comes from Ukraine. You know, the warfighters that Hegseth and company are treacherously abandoning. I sure hope Ukraine continues to supply the US with important and useful lessons.
3. Perhaps the alternative to Ukraine is to get these lessons on tactics from the other big adapter of small drones, Russia. I hope I’m not giving Hegseth and co. any ideas here.
4. Battlefield drones are very short-range weapons, suitable only for expeditionary warfare, and expeditionary warfare is a very low priority for this administration. DoD’s new drone initiative is aimed primarily at the Army, which has an ambitious transformation agenda, but where is it expected to fight? I get the idea of new battlefield drones, but what’s the strategy here? If the strategy is to Pivot to the Pacific, small drones have marginal utility at most.
5. Where are the funds associated with this initiative in the DoD budget? Specifics, please.
6. DoD knows what small drones look like and how to build them. It’s good to be able to limit the red tape associated with introducing new onboard technologies, particularly since many of these will likely come from emerging producers and civil market companies. Getting rid of red tape is always laudable. But the real magic is utilization and doctrine, and the training needed for drone adaptation. Where in the DoD initiative is the budget and planning for all of this? The rather limited guidance provided for the initiative doesn’t really mention these at all.
And, as my friend Vago Muradian notes, giving field officers authority to procure these systems — without firm guidelines — could end up as a mish-mash of systems, complicating logistics, connectivity, operations and training. This is why running a large organization like DoD is challenging; a SecDef actually needs to standardize and optimize systems procurement, not just let people run off in multiple directions.
7. Speaking of training and tactics, one of the great questions posed by Byron Callan in his July 15 Capital Alpha note, DoD Drone Directive – Has That Much Really Changed?, concerns the tactical trade-offs associated with mass drone adaptation: “If an infantry squad is to carry a couple of FPV drones, what weapon or other items are given up?”
8. Since militaries know what small drones look like, much of the hard work is in developing the right combination of new technologies and systems that counter them. Also, the smart money seems more focused on counter-drone dominance by 2027, which is hardly surprising since the Ukrainians regard C-UAS as an increasingly high priority as Russia steps up its drone attacks. It could be that the private sector is simply moving a lot faster and smarter than Suits in Washington.
9. Putting aside Hegseth’s performative vilification of the Biden administration (“While global military drone production skyrocketed over the last three years, the previous administration deployed red tape.”), please explain more about that red tape that has purportedly inhibited drone adaptation. I’d like to know specifics. In reality, budgets for drones have been very strong over the past few decades.
10. Similarly, DoD has had programs like Replicator and Hellscape for a few years now. To what extent will this “new” initiative build on those small drone programs?
11. Also speaking of existing drone programs, anyone spending time at AUSA and other service conventions has seen a remarkable proliferation of companies building small drones over the last 10+ years. How many of these new companies and their products are under contract? To what extent have these companies been consulted about this initiative, and what’s different now, if anything?
Apparatchiks like Hegseth really need to understand how the private sector works, particularly with new systems development and capital generation. In fairness, the memo does argue for “Leveraging private capital flows that support this industry,” but it does not acknowledge that this process has been underway for a very long time.
12. Last point. Metallica. Hey, Metallica. You guys are arguably one of the coolest bands on Earth. Did you really approve Enter Sandman for this rather un-cool video? If not, you need better lawyers.
Yours, ‘Til I Return To A Less Strange DC, In A Parallel Stranger Universe,
Richard Aboulafia