America’s drone production is in a sorry state. To rectify what has become a chronic and dangerous shortage, the Trump administration is working to dramatically boost production.
There’s no time to waste.
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On June 2, Russia launched a massive drone and missile strike on the Ukrainian cities of Dnipro, Kharkiv, and Kyiv. Ukrainian officials said Russia “intentionally” targeted civilian infrastructure, destroying apartment buildings and killing children.
Moscow’s barbarism is despicable. But it isn’t new.
The same can’t be said for Russia’s drone production. Russia launched 656 drones and 73 missiles overnight, making the attack one of the largest aerial assaults since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion began more than four years ago.
At the war’s beginning, some commentators claimed that a war of attrition would deplete Russia’s industrial base. Instead, the long war has fueled the drone capabilities of Russia and Ukraine alike.
In April 2026 alone, Russia launched 8,000 drone strikes against Ukraine, nearly eight times the number expended in the last few months of 2022, when the war began.
Russia is pouring resources into the unmanned systems that Moscow clearly believes to be the future of warfare.
Russia reportedly plans to manufacture 7.3 million first-person view drones in 2026, according to Ukrainian military intelligence figures cited in May by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. In 2024, by contrast, Putin claimed that Russia had produced 1.4 million.
Russia has been aided significantly by China and Iran, which have supplied Moscow with the dual-use materials necessary for its weapons of war.
America, by contrast, is falling behind. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The United States is a pioneer in drone warfare. Along with its ally Israel, the American military was one of the first to use unmanned aerial vehicles in war. U.S. drones and tactics remain a cut above our adversaries. Both production and cost have been pitiful.
According to a 2025 estimate, the U.S. has the capacity to produce 100,000 drones a year, a far cry from the millions that Russia is fielding. While Russia’s drones might not be as advanced, in warfare, quantity has a quality of its own.
Before Trump won reelection, defense sales accounted for less than 2% of all government and commercial drone systems, according to the Department of War’s Defense Innovation Unit.
Thankfully, that is about to change.
In a concerted bid to boost production, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, a lending office set up under the Biden administration, is pursuing funding deals with several different drone companies. The goal is to bring down prices and to provide incentives for manufacturers to build out supply. Most American defense drones currently cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the Pentagon’s target is $5,000 per unit.
This effort coincides with the Department of War’s preexisting Drone Dominance program, a roughly $1 billion initiative that seeks to provide more than 300,000 low-cost attack drones by 2027.
These initiatives are a necessary, if belated, start to solving America’s inability to produce defense drones at scale. But they are still short of sufficient.
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Ukraine manufactured more than 4 million drones last year. The U.S. would be hard-pressed to find a better partner for scaling battlefield drone production. Washington should invest in American manufacturers, but it should also work with Kyiv to absorb the lessons, designs, and production methods forged under fire.
America does not need to match Russia drone for drone. It does need the industrial capacity to deter adversaries who believe they can win wars by outproducing us. Drone dominance will require more than superior technology. It will require mass production, lower costs, reliable supply chains, and allies who have already learned how modern drone warfare is fought.
