The Drone Revolution Didn’t Wait for America.

Not long ago, the United States led the world in drone warfare. It built an entire model of conflict around remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) long-endurance platforms like the Predator and Reaper, designed to watch, strike, and loiter over targets halfway across the world. But while the U.S. fine-tuned that formula over two decades of counterterrorism campaigns, a new revolution in drone warfare emerged elsewhere.

This one didn’t come from DARPA or defense primes. It came from workshops in Kyiv, garages in Gaza, and the flat plains of Donbas, born out of necessity, made possible by consumer tech, and driven by the brutal demands of attritional war.

Today’s drone battlefield doesn’t resemble the one Washington envisioned. What was once bespoke and controlled from air-conditioned cabins in Nevada, has become disposable and battlefield worn. Drones now cost less than a decent laptop and are fielded not just for reconnaissance or targeted killing, but to plug the holes left by strained logistics, collapsing comms, and insufficient manpower.

Ukraine, Israel, and Russia haven’t just embraced drones, they’ve embedded them into every layer of combat. The U.S., meanwhile, is still caught trying to scale programs built on 1990s assumptions, priced for 2030 budgets, and paced like it's still peacetime.

The U.S. military remains enamoured with large, complex systems, a cultural carryover from the days when air supremacy was guaranteed and procurement cycles spanned administrations. Today’s adversaries don’t think like that. They mass-produce, deploy, and iterate in weeks, not years. They don’t separate tactical from strategic or ISR from kinetic. They build drones to die in the service of real-time advantage.

The war isn’t over the horizon anymore; it’s happening as you read this at trench level, and it’s being fought by units using commercial drones with improvisation as tools of combat, not just eyes in the sky.

This shift has exposed a gap in American thinking that money alone won’t close. Despite Secretary Hegseth’s public declarations to “unleash drone dominance,” what we see instead is a military still in the prototype phase, experimenting with million-dollar collaborative aircraft and still-bound-by-the-bureaucracy drone initiatives. When compared to the velocity and volume of Ukraine’s battlefield drone economy, America’s production base looks sluggish and overengineered. Even if we wanted to field thousands of expendable drones per month, it’s doubtful the industrial base could deliver.

This isn’t about funding shortfalls or even innovation capacity. It’s about doctrine, control, and culture. The U.S. built its drone identity on the belief that high-end systems could prevent American casualties, provide clean intelligence, and let politicians manage war from the Situation Room. The military’s current drone architecture is a byproduct of those Cold War-era expectations, remote, precise, and top-down. But war has changed. It’s noisier now, more decentralised. It’s fought in electromagnetic chaos, where connectivity is fragile and autonomy isn’t optional, it’s survival.

There’s a deeper institutional reluctance to accept what this new type of war demands. The U.S. military still defaults to airmen flying drones from climate-controlled trailers in Nevada. Command structures and procurement protocols still treat unmanned systems as peripheral or niche, not as the backbone of force projection. The services, in competition for budget and prestige, cling to the platforms that define their legacy, carriers, fighters, tanks, and treat drones as adjuncts rather than successors.

But attrition warfare doesn't care about nostalgia. Ukraine has revealed a future where every platoon expects to fly, scout, strike, and resupply autonomously. That future isn’t years away, it’s now. It’s cheap, brutal, and relentless. And it’s one America isn’t ready for.

The irony is that the United States saw this coming. As far back as the 1980s, American strategists imagined autonomous sensors, loitering munitions, and drone swarms reshaping the battlefield. The tech was speculative then, but the thinking was sharp. Yet somewhere between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the global war on terror, the urgency to build a dispersed, robotic force gave way to the allure of clean kills and low-casualty air campaigns.

Risk aversion became strategy. Political optics trumped operational courage. And in the end, we created a drone fleet tailored to wars that wouldn’t scale and threats that wouldn’t wait.

The aftermath of 9/11 cemented that path. Drones became surgical tools of counterinsurgency, precision instruments for an era defined by manhunts and ISR-centric mission sets. The Air Force took the lead, and drones were shaped in its image: sleek, high-flying, and expensive. Army and Navy interest stayed lukewarm. Tactical autonomy, off-the-shelf adaptation, and bottom-up innovation were seen as dangerous departures from the control-centric culture of the Pentagon.

Even now, we’re seeing efforts to fast-track procurement and experiment with commercial platforms, but it’s reactionary, not strategic. It’s catch-up, not leadership.

If the United States wants to remain relevant in the era of drone-dominated conflict, it needs more than acquisitions reform or pilot projects. It needs to unlearn decades of assumptions about what war should look like. That includes revisiting the idea that American blood is more valuable than American treasure, because in an era of economic stress and political scrutiny, neither is infinite. It means asking if our traditional procurement machine, with its 5-year timelines and 12-figure programs, can survive in a world where adversaries are fielding new drone variants monthly. And it means challenging the services’ collective addiction to complexity, an addiction that has turned adaptability into a liability and made “affordable” a dirty word.

It also means real reform, legislative and structural. Commanders in the field need authority to source, test, and deploy drone solutions as quickly as threats evolve. That might mean bypassing traditional chains of acquisition or stripping the services of exclusive control over drone development. It will certainly mean empowering a new class of industrial players, firms that can build in quantity, at speed, and without needing a decade of roadmap funding to reach operational relevance.

This is precisely why Artemis X - Artemis Defense Technologies exists. After nearly a year of intentional absence from the autonomous industry, we returned not to chase contracts, but to reshape the tempo. We reacquired ArtemisX Defense Inc. to harden and scale production capacity in infrastructure tailored for war-ready delivery. We weren’t waiting for a doctrinal memo. We aligned around the idea that drones should be treated not as delicate assets, but as expendable munitions, swarm focused able, survivable, and scalable.

Artemis didn’t pivot toward autonomy because it was fashionable. We did it because survivability demanded it. We have secured ITAR-compliant domestic supply chains when others were outsourcing to Shenzhen. We wait for the Pentagon’s doctrinal shift; we planned for it.

Let’s be clear about what this shift requires. It’s not another Silicon Valley drone start-up built around slide decks and seed funding. It’s not two PhDs who met at a coffee machine in a tech campus. What’s needed is industrial capacity, real, physical capability. Skilled American workers. Tool-and-die operators. Composite specialists and molding experts. Welders. CNC machinists. Million dollar pick and place electronic assembly lines, People who know how to build things that work under pressure.

This kind of work doesn’t sound exciting to venture capital firms looking for the next software play. But it’s where the defence sector is heading. And it’s already underway.

Artemis has secured more than one million square feet of U.S.-based production space across several states. Another 140,000 square feet is coming online shortly. These aren’t vacant lots or warehouse leases. They are hardened facilities, set up, staffed, and equipped to deliver high-volume, low-cost autonomous systems ready for deployment.

The next generation of defence companies won’t be built around buzzwords. It won’t look like founders pitching AI solutions over lunch. It will look like engineers and technicians in a well-lit facility in the South or Midwest, assembling systems that work and can be delivered at scale. The defence sector is moving from prototypes to production. From pitch decks to supply chains. From theatre to utility.

Right now my thoughts are on the possibility of within the space set aside is a home for several of the Ukrainian entities that have brilliant product that simply needs to be a little more robust, and built in America for the American market?

The technology matters. But the ability to build it, quickly and in volume, matters more.And no number of drones-no matter how advanced-can compensate for a defence industry that can’t adapt to that reality.