War Secretary Pete Hegseth highlights US push for military drone adoption

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth highlighted U.S. ambitions to acquire massive quantities of drones.

Hegseth, who noted that he is focused on “rebuilding” the nation’s military, said in a video message that “Drone Dominance is a billion-dollar program funded by President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.”

“We cannot afford to shoot down cheap drones with $2 million dollar missiles. And we ourselves must be able to field large quantities of capable attack drones,” he said.

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“Drone dominance will do two things: Drive costs down and capabilities up. We will deliver tens of thousands of small drones to our force in 2026, and hundreds of thousands of them by 2027. I will soon be meeting with the military services to discuss transformational changes in warfighting doctrine. We need to outfit our combat units with unmanned systems at scale,” Hegseth asserted.

Business tycoon Elon Musk has repeatedly emphasized the importance of drones in war.

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“Drones are the future of warfare. Manned aircraft are not,” he declared in a post on X earlier this year. 

“We better figure out how to build drones at scale fast or we are doomed to be a vassal state… ” he warned in another post.

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In a post last year he wrote, “Future wars are all about drones & hypersonic missiles. Fighter jets piloted by humans will be destroyed very quickly.”