I don’t think “number of drones produced” is a good proxy for “aggregate quality and usefulness of drones produced if a country decided it’s important”.
I thought the U.S. had by far the world’s most advanced military manufacturing industry, with approximately all cutting edge military technologies (including most drone designs) being developed here. Seems like this would apply straightforwardly to drones. There is possibly an unspoken argument here that drones do not require much technological innovation to make good, or less technological sophistication, as it’s more important to just mass produce them, but I don’t currently buy it. In as much as drones will be a really crucial military technology, I expect you will get substantial returns to quality, and the U.S. won’t be bottlenecked on literal volume of production.
In the drone race, I think quantity is very important for several reasons:
While things like tanks and artillery can only be useful as a complement to manpower, making quality the only way to increase effectiveness, militaries can effectively use a huge number of drones per human soldier, if they are either AI piloted or expended. Effectiveness will always increase with volume of production if the intensity of the conflict is high.
American IFVs and tanks cost something like $100-$200/kg, and artillery shells something like $20/kg, but American drones range from $6,000 to $13k per kg. This means that at American costs, the US can only afford ~1% of the fires (by mass) delivered by drone as by artillery if it’s investing equally in artillery and drones. There is a huge amount of room to cut costs and the US would need to do so to maximize effectiveness.
Many key performance metrics of drones, like range and payload fraction, are limited by physics, basic materials science, and commodity hardware. US, China, Ukraine, and Russia will be using close to the same batteries and propellers.
However, quality could affect things like speed, accuracy, AI, and anti EW performance, so it might be more important when AI is more widely used and countermeasures like lasers and autoturrets are standard
Russia is already cutting costs (e.g. making propellers out of wood rather than carbon) showing that on the current margin, quantity > quality.
I agree that quantity is important, though there clearly is some threshold beyond which there are diminishing returns (though I am not confident it’s within the range that’s plausible).
American defense spending is approximately $1T, and that is in times of peace, so even if each drone ends up costing $10,000, we could afford a drone army of one hundred million drones, if we made it the defense strategic priority[1].
And even if they cost $100k each, that’s still 10 million drones, which is plausibly beyond the threshold where returns to quantity have substantially diminished. I think the US government just really has a lot of money to spend on defense, and so you can have a huge amount of even very expensive drones.
I am assuming here you either increase defense spending when it becomes important, or you stock up over a few years, and so total spending on the drone army is roughly proportional to annual spending.
American drones are very expensive. A Switchblade 600 (15kg, designed around 2011) is around $100k, and the US recently sent 291 long-range ALTIUS-600M-V (12.2kg) to Taiwan for $300M indicating a unit cost of $1M. So $1T would only buy 1 million of the newer design, at least for export. Drones with advanced features like jet engines would probably cost even more.
Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones in 2024, and its 2025 production goal is 4.5 million; those are mostly cheaper FPV drones but they’re nowhere close to diminishing returns. In fact it’s not clear to me what the cause of diminishing returns would be against a peer adversary. Running out of targets that are targetable with drones? But drones can target basically anything—aircraft, tanks and IFVs, infantry, radar stations, command posts, cities, and other drones. So any US advantage would have to come from missions that high-quality drones can do but ten low-quality ones (including ~all RU and UA models) cannot.
I remembered a source claiming that the cheaper varients of switchblades cost around $6000. But, I looked into it and this seems like just an error. Some sources claim this, but more commonly sources claim ~$60,000. (Close to your $100k claim.)
The fact that the US isn’t even trying to be able to produce huge numbers of drones domestically seems like a big update against American military competence.
By which mechanism would all that defense spending be quickly repurposed towards drone manufacturing? All the things that make big institutions so small-c conservative—like the bureaucracy, the legal apparatus, the procurement rules, and the defense contractors with their long-running contracts—ensure that no such large-scale shift in strategy can occur, no?
And even if that did happen, by which mechanism do you convert $1T into actually manufactured drones within any relevant time frame?
I think if you have literal hot war between two superpowers, a lot of stuff can happen. The classical example is of course the US repurposing a large fraction of its economy towards the war effort in World War II. Is that still feasible today? I do not know, but I doubt the defense contractor industry would be the biggest obstacle in the way.
Yes, I would predict that. My understanding for high-end military drones, which to be clear cost $100k+ each, the US is undisputedly the world leader. You linked to a random subreddit for consumer drones, which of course have almost nothing to do with the specific point of the U.S. being ahead on the cutting edge frontier.
My understanding is that American military technology is extremely expensive, and also at the frontier miles ahead of the competition. The thing you linked at are not at all in a comparable market (and again, yes, if mass production might turn out to be a bottleneck things are different, but I am disputing the cutting-edge point, not the mass production point).
Read the other link about how Ukraine preferred their consume-derived drones to the high-end military drones, which indeed cost 100k+ but nevertheless sucked.
Tbc this is just one link but I’ve seen this sentiment across several platforms.
That link is helpful! It does seem like cost was one of the big complaints, though other quality complaints also seemed pretty substantial.
Reading what is implied by the transcript, it seems like what happened is that the U.S. has not had that much investment into small + cheap drones, which is the market segment that ukraine really wanted. The big battle-tested drones probably worked, but really weren’t what Ukraine needed or wanted.
I also got a sense that most of the drones that didn’t perform well were from new private companies in the US. It’s a bit unclear to me how much that reflects what the US cutting edge ability is.
My current prediction is that by the end of 12 months, the best small drones will be U.S. manufactured, though far from price-competitive with other country’s drones. To be clear, I am not super confident on this. My guess is it’s also already true, it’s just not what Ukraine currently needs given their economic position.
Relevant sections of the transcript for convenience:
Heather Somerville: Starting about two years ago at the onset of the war in Ukraine, many US startups shipped their drones to Ukraine, and things went very poorly right from the start. They were very glitchy. They were very fragile in this electronic warfare environment, and these drones could not perform. Oftentimes, they couldn’t even take off. If they took off, they couldn’t complete missions, they couldn’t return home. They lost the signal between the pilot and the drone, and the drones fell out of the sky. This happened time and again. And they could not carry heavy payloads, in this case being an explosive, a grenade or something else that you drop on the enemy to blow them up. And that, of course, was a problem. They were very difficult to repair, they didn’t have parts for them. And that’s a lot of problems to contend with if you’re a Ukrainian soldier on the front lines.
Alex Ossola: US companies have made drones for a while. Why is Ukraine a particularly notable test?
Heather Somerville: Ukraine is the first war where small drones are very prominent. We’ve seen small drones being used by militias, by terrorist organizations before this, but this is the largest scale, the largest theater where they have played an extremely prominent role. And there’s also the rush among American corporations to try to help the Ukrainians. And in the beginning of the war, they could very easily find Ukrainian soldiers who were like, “Yeah, give me it. I’ll take anything.” And so, they had willing partners to use their drones, and these American companies thought, this will be our badge of being battle-tested, and we’ll start getting orders. We’ll be able to sell to the US military, to allied militaries. This is going to be great. And none of that panned out.
Alex Ossola: How much have US drone startups received in venture capital funding?
Heather Somerville: I estimated about $2.5 billion has been invested by venture capitalists into drone technology startups in the US in the last 24 months. So, they’re getting money, but that only lasts so long, of course, at a certain point, you need to start to make money. And having a customer continues to be a big problem for these companies that cannot sell to hobbyists. And that is because China has dominated the hobbyist industry. They can sell some to police officers and fire departments and search and rescue crews, and that’s great, but you only need so many drones for that purpose. They can sell some to utility companies and farmers who want to survey the land from the sky, but they were hoping that the cash cow would be the DoD with its big, huge budget, and there’s no indication that is the direction that this is going.
Alex Ossola: What will it take for US-produced drones to do better on the battlefield.
Heather Somerville: They have to reimagine what they’re building. And in the case of company Skydio, this is a drone company where I am in Silicon Valley, that’s raised a lot of money. They have built a new drone. They tell us that they have fixed the problems. They’re very clear that this is based on feedback largely from the Ukrainians, and they say it’s going to function in the electronic warfare environment. There’s another company in Utah called Teal Drones that says it has a drone there that is working and is hopeful the Ukrainians will buy it in large number. So, we’ll see if these companies make good on this.
I don’t think “number of drones produced” is a good proxy for “aggregate quality and usefulness of drones produced if a country decided it’s important”.
I thought the U.S. had by far the world’s most advanced military manufacturing industry, with approximately all cutting edge military technologies (including most drone designs) being developed here. Seems like this would apply straightforwardly to drones. There is possibly an unspoken argument here that drones do not require much technological innovation to make good, or less technological sophistication, as it’s more important to just mass produce them, but I don’t currently buy it. In as much as drones will be a really crucial military technology, I expect you will get substantial returns to quality, and the U.S. won’t be bottlenecked on literal volume of production.
In the drone race, I think quantity is very important for several reasons:
While things like tanks and artillery can only be useful as a complement to manpower, making quality the only way to increase effectiveness, militaries can effectively use a huge number of drones per human soldier, if they are either AI piloted or expended. Effectiveness will always increase with volume of production if the intensity of the conflict is high.
American IFVs and tanks cost something like $100-$200/kg, and artillery shells something like $20/kg, but American drones range from $6,000 to $13k per kg. This means that at American costs, the US can only afford ~1% of the fires (by mass) delivered by drone as by artillery if it’s investing equally in artillery and drones. There is a huge amount of room to cut costs and the US would need to do so to maximize effectiveness.
Many key performance metrics of drones, like range and payload fraction, are limited by physics, basic materials science, and commodity hardware. US, China, Ukraine, and Russia will be using close to the same batteries and propellers.
However, quality could affect things like speed, accuracy, AI, and anti EW performance, so it might be more important when AI is more widely used and countermeasures like lasers and autoturrets are standard
Russia is already cutting costs (e.g. making propellers out of wood rather than carbon) showing that on the current margin, quantity > quality.
I agree that quantity is important, though there clearly is some threshold beyond which there are diminishing returns (though I am not confident it’s within the range that’s plausible).
American defense spending is approximately $1T, and that is in times of peace, so even if each drone ends up costing $10,000, we could afford a drone army of one hundred million drones, if we made it the defense strategic priority[1].
And even if they cost $100k each, that’s still 10 million drones, which is plausibly beyond the threshold where returns to quantity have substantially diminished. I think the US government just really has a lot of money to spend on defense, and so you can have a huge amount of even very expensive drones.
I am assuming here you either increase defense spending when it becomes important, or you stock up over a few years, and so total spending on the drone army is roughly proportional to annual spending.
American drones are very expensive. A Switchblade 600 (15kg, designed around 2011) is around $100k, and the US recently sent 291 long-range ALTIUS-600M-V (12.2kg) to Taiwan for $300M indicating a unit cost of $1M. So $1T would only buy 1 million of the newer design, at least for export. Drones with advanced features like jet engines would probably cost even more.
Ukraine produced 2.2 million drones in 2024, and its 2025 production goal is 4.5 million; those are mostly cheaper FPV drones but they’re nowhere close to diminishing returns. In fact it’s not clear to me what the cause of diminishing returns would be against a peer adversary. Running out of targets that are targetable with drones? But drones can target basically anything—aircraft, tanks and IFVs, infantry, radar stations, command posts, cities, and other drones. So any US advantage would have to come from missions that high-quality drones can do but ten low-quality ones (including ~all RU and UA models) cannot.
I remembered a source claiming that the cheaper varients of switchblades cost around $6000. But, I looked into it and this seems like just an error. Some sources claim this, but more commonly sources claim ~$60,000. (Close to your $100k claim.)
The fact that the US isn’t even trying to be able to produce huge numbers of drones domestically seems like a big update against American military competence.
By which mechanism would all that defense spending be quickly repurposed towards drone manufacturing? All the things that make big institutions so small-c conservative—like the bureaucracy, the legal apparatus, the procurement rules, and the defense contractors with their long-running contracts—ensure that no such large-scale shift in strategy can occur, no?
And even if that did happen, by which mechanism do you convert $1T into actually manufactured drones within any relevant time frame?
I think if you have literal hot war between two superpowers, a lot of stuff can happen. The classical example is of course the US repurposing a large fraction of its economy towards the war effort in World War II. Is that still feasible today? I do not know, but I doubt the defense contractor industry would be the biggest obstacle in the way.
Doesn’t this predict the US would currently produce the world’s best drones? Which by pretty universal acclaim is simply not true.
Or consider, for instance, the drones that American companies sent to Ukraine, which were largely duds.
Yes, I would predict that. My understanding for high-end military drones, which to be clear cost $100k+ each, the US is undisputedly the world leader. You linked to a random subreddit for consumer drones, which of course have almost nothing to do with the specific point of the U.S. being ahead on the cutting edge frontier.
My understanding is that American military technology is extremely expensive, and also at the frontier miles ahead of the competition. The thing you linked at are not at all in a comparable market (and again, yes, if mass production might turn out to be a bottleneck things are different, but I am disputing the cutting-edge point, not the mass production point).
Read the other link about how Ukraine preferred their consume-derived drones to the high-end military drones, which indeed cost 100k+ but nevertheless sucked.
Tbc this is just one link but I’ve seen this sentiment across several platforms.
That link is helpful! It does seem like cost was one of the big complaints, though other quality complaints also seemed pretty substantial.
Reading what is implied by the transcript, it seems like what happened is that the U.S. has not had that much investment into small + cheap drones, which is the market segment that ukraine really wanted. The big battle-tested drones probably worked, but really weren’t what Ukraine needed or wanted.
I also got a sense that most of the drones that didn’t perform well were from new private companies in the US. It’s a bit unclear to me how much that reflects what the US cutting edge ability is.
My current prediction is that by the end of 12 months, the best small drones will be U.S. manufactured, though far from price-competitive with other country’s drones. To be clear, I am not super confident on this. My guess is it’s also already true, it’s just not what Ukraine currently needs given their economic position.
Relevant sections of the transcript for convenience: