Army wants to buy as many drones as it does munitions

The Army wants to buy drones in the “kind of quantities” it buys munitions, Army acquisition chief Doug Bush said Wednesday during an webcast with Defense News. 

“We need them potentially at very large scale and very quickly,” said Bush. “They're somewhere between a munition and the way we think about a large platform,” he added. 

The Army has plans to eventually field drones of different types at the platoon, company, and brigade levels. So far, the Army has only fielded drones at the platoon level under the Short Range Reconnaissance program. Fielding of the drone, currently the Skydio RQ-28A, is still in its early stages. The Army requested 207 of these drones in 2023, and 459 in 2024, according to budget documents. 

In September, the Army selected Anduril and Performance Drone Works to provide drones to company-level units. These drones are larger than the RQ-28A and have a longer loitering time, among other features. Starting in fiscal year 2026, the Army will evaluate prototype drones for the brigade level program. 

The Army may also field first-person-view drones, typically used as a loitering munition, and tethered drones. 

Bush did not specify what types of munitions he was referring to. Excluding rounds for small arms, the Army buys munitions like missiles and artillery shells in the range of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

Army leaders have put drones at the center of a new fielding effort dubbed “transforming in contact,” and have asked for more money for them in this year’s unfunded priorities lists. Multiple units across the Army are also  experimenting with drone uses and training. 

However, an Defense One analysis indicates that U.S. industry is not ready to produce the hundreds of thousands of drones that may be needed in a major war, 

“Until the U.S. military mainstreams operational concepts that demand large numbers of drones, production will remain at a relatively low level,” Hudson Institute senior fellow Bryan Clark previously told Defense One. 

Smaller drones like those the Army gives platoons and companies are relatively simple to manufacture, Bush said. “A lot of it is people hand-building things.” 

Bush also highlighted the Army’s focus on software-based updates and modular open-system architecture—the ability to easily add and subtract components like a new radar or sensor. 

“Those are the two major pushes from both large platforms like [Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft] and XM-30 [Infantry Combat Vehicle] all the way down to small [drones],” Bush said. 

Both approaches allow the Army to upgrade equipment quickly, helping the service to field improved systems “at the speed needed in combat,” he said. 

Bush also said artificial intelligence is decreasing the load on the Army’s contracting force. There are AI pilot programs that assist contracting personnel in “everything from our research to writing initial [request for proposals] to doing draft contracts to doing evaluations of contracts,” Bush said. 

“I'm assuming we're probably not going to get a lot more [contracting professionals],” he said. “We've got to use technology to help them do their jobs.”