The Drone Gap: Why the U.S. Industrial Base Continues to Fall Behind in a World at War by Drone

Photo Credit: Created with SocialSight AI.

This OpEd was originally published in S.C. Media.

March 2, 2026

Author: Brett Freedman, Senior Director for Emerging Technology at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure (ICIT)

In an earlier article last summer, "America's blind spot as drone production surges globally," I argued that U.S. counter-drone policy was falling well behind the pace of technological and geopolitical change.  

Since then, the picture has only grown more concerning. Dr. David Mussington has highlighted deep structural weaknesses in U.S. drone policy and governance, particularly the fragmentation among civilian, commercial, and military authorities.

Reengagements with drone manufacturers further underscore a harsher reality: The core challenge is no longer detection or defense, but production.

Wars today are fought with drones, not as niche enablers, but as central instruments of warfare. In Ukraine, drones are the primary means of reconnaissance and targeting, and they also carry out strikes against Russian forces. They are used continuously in large numbers.

Recent innovations pairing drones with AI have resulted in this past December becoming the deadliest month for the Russian forces by far, with 184 deaths per day, an increase of 37% over the average of previous months.

Multiple open-source analyses suggest that most battlefield casualties in the Ukraine-Russia war were caused by drones rather than traditional artillery or airpower. This is not a future scenario; it is the present reality of modern war.

Yet the United States remains dangerously behind in its ability to manufacture drones at scale.

This is the drone gap: a widening mismatch between the role drones now play in warfare and the capacity of the U.S. industrial base to produce them in sufficient numbers, at sufficient speed, and with sufficient resilience to sustain a prolonged conflict.

The global drone-production landscape

The global drone ecosystem is defined by overwhelming Chinese domination.

China produces roughly 90 percent of the world's commercial drones, It also controls a commanding share of the components used to build them, including airframes, batteries, motors, cameras, radios, and displays, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

This Chinese dominance in drones is not an accident. It is the result of a deliberate industrial policy that has created vertically integrated supply chains and massive commercial scale that reduces cost while accelerating iteration.

The implications extend far beyond hobbyist markets. Commercial drone production underwrites military capability. Scale produces learning effects; learning produces reliability, lower costs, and rapid adaptation. China's commercial drone dominance feeds directly into its military and dual-use drone ecosystem.

By contrast, the U.S. drone industrial base is fragmented, expensive, and constrained by supply-chain problems. Many American drone manufacturers, even those assembling domestically, are dependent on Chinese components, which creates economic vulnerability and national-security risk.

The problem is not innovation. It is the inability to manufacture drones in large numbers.

Lessons from Ukraine and Russia: Production as a weapon

The war in Ukraine shows a fundamental shift in how military power is created. Ukraine and Russia are not just deploying drones, but producing them continuously, often close to the battlefield. Drone production, modification, and repair are embedded directly in the warfighting loop.

In Ukraine, distributed workshops and rapid prototyping let units modify drones for new missions or against new countermeasures within days or weeks. Russia, meanwhile, has dramatically expanded domestic production while drawing on foreign designs and suppliers to sustain large-scale drone use.

The drone that is lost on the battlefield today must be replaced tomorrow. Wars of attrition have become wars of drone production. Victory depends on who can build, replenish, and adapt drones the fastest, not who fields the most advanced weapons platform.

Replicator vs. industrial reality

The Pentagon's Replicator initiative reflects a growing recognition of this shift. Its goal — to rapidly field large numbers of expendable autonomous— is strategically correct. But Replicator operates within an industrial base that is poorly suited to mass production of cheap weapons.

For decades, the U.S. defense system has optimized for "exquisite" platforms: highly capable, highly survivable, and extremely expensive systems produced in small numbers. (Think of a two-million-dollar Tomahawk missile.) This model breaks down when adversaries deploy thousands of cheap, expendable drones.

The risk is that the Replicator program becomes a wish-list instead of an industrial reality. If so, it will leave U.S. drone production still constrained by procurement timelines, fragile supply chains and insufficient manufacturing capacity.

Recent signals: production push and market contraction

Two recent U.S. government actions underscore both the urgency of the problem and the tension in current policy.

First, the Department of Defense launched a major push to scale domestic drone production, publicly signaling its intent to procure tens of thousands of low-cost drones on accelerated timelines, with delivery targets beginning this year.  

This effort reflects a broader directive — sometimes dubbed "Drone Dominance" — to field attritable, expendable systems at scale and restructure acquisition processes to support rapid industrial output.

At the service level, the U.S. Army has taken this mission a step further with the SkyFoundry pilot program, a domestic industrial initiative designed to establish high-volume drone manufacturing capacity.

Under SkyFoundry, Army leaders are setting up facilities that can produce drones "at the tens of thousands" by next fall, with initial monthly output targets as high as 10,000 systems per facility and plans to scale beyond that as new manufacturing sites come online.

The SkyFoundry program aims to leverage additive manufacturing, off-the-shelf parts, and public-private partnerships to create a sustained domestic production pipeline decoupled from Chinese supply chains.

Second, in late 2025, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) added DJI and other foreign-made drones and components to its Covered List, effectively blocking new FCC authorizations for future models unless cleared by national-security agencies.

While existing aircraft remain generally unaffected, the decision sharply constricts the U.S. commercial drone market in the short term and signals increasing regulatory scrutiny on foreign supply chains.

Together, these moves highlight a central tension: The United States knows it must be able to build military drones at large scale.  Yet it has not built the industrial ecosystem needed to support this goal.

Factories matter as much as fighters

The next major war will not be won solely by the superior algorithms or exquisite platforms that the U.S. military has invested in. It will be won by the side that can produce, replace, and adapt expendable weapons faster than its adversary.

The United States has world-class engineers, operators, and innovators. What it lacks is a manufacturing base aligned with the realities of drone warfare.

The drone gap is not inevitable, but closing it will require urgency, coordination, and a willingness to rethink how America builds its tools of war. That's because in the wars of tomorrow, victory will be decided on the factory floor.

Brett Freedman

Brett Freedman is the Senior Director for Emerging Technology at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure (ICIT), a non-profit organization dedicated to the security and resilience of critical infrastructure that provides for people’s foundational needs.  He also serves as a Senior National Security Fellow at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas-Austin Law School.  The opinions expressed in this article are his own and do not reflect the views of any employer or affiliated organization.

About ICIT

The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501(c)3think tank with the mission of modernizing, securing, and making resilient critical infrastructure that provides for people’s foundational needs. ICIT takes no institutional positions on policy matters. Rather than advocate, ICIT is dedicated to being a resource for the organizations and communities that share our mission. By applying a people-centric lens to critical infrastructure research and decision making, our work ensures that modernization and security investments have a lasting, positive impact on society. Learn more at www.icitech.org.