Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has directed the US military to leapfrog ahead its adversaries — including Russia — and establish “drone dominance” by 2027. But the US peacetime culture that drives military procurement and operations is no match for the real-world laboratory of the Ukrainian battlefield that has put Russia in the ascendancy when it comes to modern drone warfare.
Hegseth, speaking at a recent press event on the lawn in front of the Pentagon, announced new policies designed to usher in an era of US “drone dominance.” With the assistance of uniformed soldiers operating small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS — a term for the type of small drones often seen in civilian use), Hegseth signed a memorandum entitled “Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance,” which outlined his vision of acquiring and utilizing what he called “the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation.”
The defense secretary’s memo lambasted bureaucratic roadblocks that, according to him, prevented the US military from acquiring “the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires” — drones being employed in significant numbers by the US’ potential adversaries. He ordered that hundreds of US-made products be approved for purchase by the US military that would permit combat units to be armed with a wide variety of low-cost drones and for these drones to be incorporated into training exercises.
Declaring that “drone dominance is a process race as much as a technological race,” Hegseth tasked the US military with creating purpose-built units designed to enable the rapid integration of sUAS capability across the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines by 2026, with the priority of effort to be given to US forces operating in the Indo-Pacific. To facilitate this effort, Hegseth ordered the US military to streamline its acquisition processes both in terms of product identification and purchasing, including innovative procedures such as advance purchasing commitments, direct loans and other incentives designed to bypass the normal bureaucratic entanglements affiliated with government contracting.
Blue and Green Lists
One of the key takeaways from Hegseth’s memo was the directive that “major purchases shall favor US companies” and “be informed by Blue List ratings.” The Blue UAS Cleared List is a compilation of drones found to be compliant with current law and policy, validated as cyber-secure and, as such, available for purchase and operation by the Department of Defense. The Blue List thus provides military consumers with a list of pre-approved drones that give them options for “evolving missions.”
The Blue List is derived from what is known as the “Green List” — a nongovernment-affiliated list published by the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). A nonprofit organization that partners with industry stakeholders, AUVSI helps expedite and streamline the vetting of commercial and nondefense drone technologies to provide quality control and boost consumer confidence in UAS technologies. Since the advent of the Blue List, AUVSI has adapted the standards of the Green List so that they largely conform with the former’s verification, cyber security and supply chain compliance requirements. As a result, Hegseth, in his memorandum, opened the AUVSI Green List to military customers so that the UAS drones on it could be treated as the equivalent of Blue List systems for the purpose of military purchases.
In theory, the combination of the lists provides even more options for military consumers when it comes to selecting UAS drones for their operational requirements. This is the apparent goal of Hegseth’s directive. But in practice, the lists serve as self-limiting bottlenecks whose conditional prerequisites, both technical (cyber security) and financial (it costs vendors $100,000 to get on the Green List), mean that bureaucratic — as opposed to purely operational — considerations are continuing to drive the US military’s quest for “drone dominance.”
This means peacetime cyber security standards will be imposed on a weapons system meant to surpass the capabilities of an opponent who faces no such obstacles — a recipe for disaster.
Battlefield Experience
Hegseth has directed that within 90 days of the signing of his memorandum, the US military will designate at least three national ranges with diverse terrain — including at least one with over-water areas — for drone usage. Units operating UAS will have access to Department of Defense grounds with “abundant airspace and spectrum allocation.” What this translates into is that UAS-equipped units will be given priority over other military formations when it comes to using training grounds that have been cleared for UAS operations.
The problem for Hegseth and the US military is that their potential adversaries have a massive head start and cannot be caught using peacetime practices and procedures. This extends beyond the simple question of tactics: The US Army in Europe, for example, is only now learning how to adapt UAS systems to drop grenades on an enemy target — something the Russians have been doing since 2022 under combat conditions. The issue is more complex, involving the complete life cycle of UAS systems under wartime conditions, from procurement, to adaptation and modification, to employment and feedback.
While Hegseth seeks to establish training grounds where the US military can begin to learn the many nuances involved in adapting UAS technology to modern military doctrine — and vice versa — those whom the US seeks to dominate when it comes to drone warfare have already been involved in the most comprehensive, demanding and valuable training possible — that of the modern battlefield.
From the very start, the Russia-Ukraine war has pushed the boundaries of how drones are used in modern high-intensity conflict. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation has acknowledged that the drone warfare doctrine and capabilities Russia started the conflict with were not fit for purpose. Indeed, every aspect of modern drone warfare — conceived and furthered in peacetime — proved lacking in the extreme under the stress of actual war.
Russia adapted quickly, importing Shaheed-136 attack drones from Iran and modifying them for the Ukraine conflict. These drones, rechristened “Geraniums,” played a major role in overwhelming Ukraine’s integrated air defenses. Russia could then turn its attention to the employment of combat drones. The existing family of strike drones was adapted to the reality of high-intensity conflict with great impact.
The biggest changes came on the battlefield. Russian and Ukrainian troops both began using small commercial drones, primarily of Chinese origin, to drop grenades and mortars on enemy positions. Later, high-explosive charges were attached, and the drones took on a kamikaze role, sent on one-way missions to hunt down enemy personnel and equipment.
Most recently, the area around the town of Pokrovsk, in Donetsk, became the ultimate hotspot for drone warfare. Here, the Ukrainians employed swarms of drones to stop a major Russian offensive dead in its tracks. The Russians responded by employing their own drone force, which, for the first time, incorporated fiber-optic cables to avoid being jammed by enemy electronic warfare, to regain the initiative. The Ukrainians then deployed their own fiber-optic drones, to equalize the battlefield. And the Russians responded by developing tactics that targeted the Ukrainian drone operators, making that job the most dangerous in the conflict. Having established drone supremacy, Russia was able to resume its advance.
It is not for nothing that the Ukrainian drone operators who survived Pokrovsk have cautioned their Nato advisers that a Nato-style military formation would be annihilated immediately upon entering a modern drone-dominated battlefield. Hegseth expects the US military’s sUAS capability to overtake that of battle-hardened adversaries like Russia by the end of 2027. Void of a training environment that replicates Pokrovsk, this expectation will most likely fall far short of reality.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer whose service over a 20-plus-year career included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control agreements, serving on the staff of US General Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War and later as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq from 1991-98. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.