Ukrainian military technicians assembled some 3.5 million first-person-view drones and other types last year and could potentially produce seven million this year. The United States, by comparison, assembles 300,000 to 400,000 annually. The production gap, already enormous, is set to widen further, David Petraeus and Isaac Flanagan argue in a new assessment of autonomous warfare.
The figures appear in a Foreign Affairs essay by the retired four-star general and his co-author, "Hvylya" reports.
The scale of drone use in Ukraine is staggering. An estimated 200,000 remote-controlled drones are launched monthly, alongside unmanned surface vessels that have sunk Russian warships and, in one case, "shot down fighter jets over the ocean." The Pentagon now plans to field more than 300,000 unmanned aerial vehicles - up from just 90 in 2001 and nearly 11,000 by 2015 - but even that target falls far short of the volumes Ukraine's battlefield demands.
Petraeus and Flanagan stress, however, that raw production numbers are only part of the equation. "The advantage in the coming era will not go to the side that assembles the largest fleet of unmanned systems," they write. "It will go to the side that first develops the operational concepts to employ them." The U.S. military is "not yet producing remotely the quantity of unmanned systems and networks a conflict like Ukraine's demands," but sound operational and tactical concepts must come before scaling production. Kyiv, meanwhile, has already offered the United States specialized military help drawn from its frontline experience.
The industrial base deficit extends beyond drones. The authors note that Washington also lacks the missile interceptors and counterdrone systems needed for larger conflicts such as the ongoing one in the Middle East. The challenge is simultaneously conceptual and industrial - and on both fronts, the United States is behind.
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