The Department of War is buying drones at a pace and scale without precedent. The Secretary of War directed that uncrewed systems be fielded in every Army Division by the end of 2026. The Marine Corps plans to procure 10,000 drones this year and is adding the V-BAT as a program of record. The Drone Dominance Program (DDP) is evaluating vendors through competitive Gauntlet events and placing prototype delivery orders, with a target of 30,000 one-way attack drones by July 2026 and over 200,000 by 2027. JIATF-401 stood up a counter-UAS marketplace in under six months and is already placing orders. Combined committed funding exceeds $2 billion.
The acquisition side is moving quickly. The logistics and sustainment infrastructure required to keep these systems operational after they arrive is not.
The Formation Has to Do Both
The defense community currently treats offensive drone capability and counter-drone defense as separate problems. At the institutional level, they are different, with different program offices buying them, different units operating them, and different appropriation lines paying the bills.
However, that separation breaks down when you look at how they are being engaged at the unit level. A brigade combat team or Marine Expeditionary Unit is operating ISR drones for reconnaissance, employing one-way attack drones for offensive fires, and defending against an adversary doing the same thing. The institutional lines that organize procurement do not organize the battlespace. Whatever the program offices buy, the formation must sustain together, in the field, under one commander.
The Industrial Base Behind It
The regulatory architecture now demands domestic sourcing for technology components being used for drone development. The FCC halted new equipment authorizations for foreign-manufactured UAS and UAS critical components in December 2025. NDAA Section 842 prohibited DoW battery procurement from foreign entities of concern. The Defense Innovation Board found that uncrewed systems have a "unique reliance on adversarial nations throughout the manufacturing lifecycle." The Senate Appropriations Committee flagged vulnerabilities in the domestic sUAS manufacturing base.
Meanwhile, demand for batteries, motors, electronic speed controllers, flight controllers, and sensors are all converging from multiple directions on the same limited domestic component pool. ISR drones, one-way attack drones, and the kinetic interceptors all share the same component supply chain restrictions. A narrow set of compliant suppliers is now expected to meet the demand of every drone program in the DoW at the same time.
The Army has recognized this gap and is taking actions to remedy it. SkyFoundry, a public-private partnership under Army Materiel Command, is converting depots like Rock Island Arsenal into drone production facilities, with a target of 10,000 units per month. The initial $197 million investment carries an 8-month lead time before production begins, with another $150 million per year planned across three years to expand the effort. SkyFoundry is the Army's most direct response to the gap. Even at its target output, the distance between domestic production capacity and combined demand across DDP, FoSUAS, Marine Corps procurement, JIATF-401, and Safer Skies Act SLTT is substantial.
Training Lags Fielding
A 2025 RAND study found that the Army's training pipeline for sUAS operators was "insufficient in terms of basic qualification throughput and preparing expert operators" and would be "overwhelmed when the Army starts fielding SUAS in greater numbers." That assessment covered UAS alone, before adding the c-UAS dimension. At the time of the study, few units had moved beyond basic operator-level proficiency, and c-UAS training was not integrated into collective exercises at echelon.
Both the Marine Corps and the Army have responded to these shortfalls. The Army launched the Unmanned Advanced Lethality Course at Fort Rucker in August 2025, covering first-person-view drone operations and fires integration over three weeks. The Combined Arms Support Command directed the Logistics Basic Officer Leader Course to integrate sUAS training so sustainment officers arrive at their first units already familiar with the systems they will have to support. The Marine Corps is running an organic c-UAS fielding effort through Program Manager Ground Based Air Defense at Quantico, building dismounted detection and defeat capability that is intentionally MOS-agnostic. That choice accelerates broad fielding, but it pushes the training burden to every unit rather than concentrating it in a dedicated owner.
These programs do not scale to the force being built. No collective training exercise routinely forces a formation to operate its own drones while defending against enemy drones at the same time.
Sustainment: Multiple Inventories, One Logistics Train
A UxS's logistics train determines whether it becomes a fielded system and useful operational capability or sits in a storage box.
Under the current modernization vision, a unit wanting to integrate UxS will require multiple sources: ISR drones from commercial vendors and industry partners, one-way attack drones from the surviving Gauntlet competitors under DDP, and c-UAS equipment ordered through JIATF-401's marketplace catalog. Multiple airframe types, battery chemistries, sensor packages, ground control stations, software ecosystems, and spare parts catalogs, all running through a logistics system built for rifles, trucks, and radios.
Shield AI's V-BAT illustrates the problem. It is entering the Marine Corps as a program of record with a sustainment profile qualitatively different from the small quadcopter and fixed-wing platforms in FoSUAS. The V-BAT requires a full engine swap every 500 hours. That is not a field-level repair, rather it requires trained maintainers, spare engines in the supply chain, a controlled maintenance environment, and a return-to-service process with inspection and documentation. For a platform that costs roughly $1 million per unit and operates from expeditionary environments where maintenance infrastructure is minimal, the 500-hour interval is a logistics planning requirement that must be built into every deployment, rotation, and budgeting cycle.
Battery management compounds the problem. Short, medium and long-range reconnaissance and ISR drones, one-way attack drones, and c-UAS interceptors all run different battery types, cell counts, charge cycles, storage requirements, and disposal procedures. A brigade or MEU logistics officer is managing five or six power and propulsion ecosystems across the portfolio simultaneously, without a template for any of it. Cost of these units compound the complexity even more. The high-capacity, high-discharge cells these systems need to perform at the top end can easily hit $800 per battery and in many cases represent 40-50% of the unit cost for one-way attack drones. Domestic manufacturing capacity for these cells is growing as new suppliers enter the market, but demand from across the drone enterprise far outstrips what they can produce.
Spare parts add another layer. Components are not interchangeable across vendors or platforms, and the c-UAS effectors in JIATF-401's marketplace catalog come from different manufacturers with different support contracts, lead times, and repair authorities. Most drone systems are also purchased without full Technical Data Rights, meaning the OEM controls who can repair what, where parts can be sourced, and how long it takes to get them. A maintainer trained on one vendor's airframe is not necessarily qualified to work on another. A deployed maintenance section supporting a multi-vendor drone fleet has no common parts bin, no common technical manuals, and no common repair procedures. In most cases, it also has no authority to fabricate replacements when parts are out of stock.
The property accountability reforms help. The Army G-4 is revising Army Regulation 735-5 to allow abandonment memos for non-negligent Group 1 and 2 UAS losses rather than triggering a Financial Liability Investigation of Property Loss. The previous system created a perverse incentive where commanders avoided employing drones aggressively because losing one meant a property investigation, and potential personal financial liability for the responsible officer. The revision addresses the cultural barrier for small UAS at the Group 1 and 2 level, but Group 3 and above platforms, including the V-BAT, still fall under the full investigation process. The reform fixes the bottom of the inventory, not the top. A commander who loses a $1 million V-BAT in combat is likely still looking at a FLIPL.
DDP's "consumable commodity" reclassification simplifies accountability for attack drones designed to be expended, treating them more like ammunition than durable equipment. The ISR fleet under FoSUAS and the V-BAT fleet in the Marine Corps are not expendable. Platforms ranging from a few thousand dollars to roughly $1 million, with encrypted communications, sensor payloads, and precision components, require maintenance, repair, and return-to-service processes that do not have a sustainment model at scale. Most depot-level repairs for these systems require shipping platforms back to CONUS or to OEM facilities, with most turnaround times measured in weeks or months. For a unit out on a 9-month rotation, a system that goes down for major maintenance is effectively out of the fight.
What Has to Move
The acquisition architecture being stood up is strong. DDP Phase II is underway with a qualifier at Camp Grayling in June and Gauntlet II in late August. JIATF-401 went from concept to IOC in under six months and placed over $13 million in initial orders by April 2026. FoSUAS's tranched approach is allowing technology refreshes to take place without triggering a program restart. The Safer Skies Act opens an entirely new domestic c-UAS market. None of this is incremental. But acquisition speed without a supporting ecosystem is going to create equipment lists, not combat power.
Funding fragmentation makes the integration harder. UAS sits in service aviation accounts, c-UAS is split across air defense procurement and JIATF-401 RDT&E authority, sustainment runs through O&M, and T&E is divided between program-specific RDT&E and range authorities. None of these accounts can be reprogrammed into another without significant work, and most cannot move without Congressional approval. The result is that gaps identified in the field cannot be closed at the speed they appear. Army leaders have publicly asked Congress for flexible "colorless money" across UAS, c-UAS, and electronic warfare to address this. The request has not yet moved.
Test & Evaluation is the bottleneck nobody is solving fast enough. DoW ranges are scheduled out months in advance, vendors are stacking up waiting for slots, and the marketplaces and acquisition programs that depend on validated performance data move only as fast as that data can be generated. Commercial ranges are becoming an attractive release valve for industry and business-to-government work, but FAA, ATF, and FCC restrictions on kinetic testing and c-UAS operations on US soil push the higher-fidelity events overseas. Companies are increasingly running their full test campaigns in more permissive environments in the Middle East or Europe, which means American technology is being validated abroad before it can be fielded at home. T&E has to reach the operational edge at the speed the threat evolves, and it has to do that in environments where the full mission set, including kinetic and c-UAS work, can actually be executed.
The drone production numbers through 2027 are looking strong. Whether they translate into a force that can attack with drones and defend against drones simultaneously, sustained in the field against an adversary iterating its own capability every two weeks, depends on whether the supporting ecosystem keeps pace.
The areas that need the most focus are domestic component manufacturing, training systems, sustainment solutions for multi-vendor drone fleets, and deployable test infrastructure that can host the full mission set. The sustainment tail in defense has historically been larger and longer-duration than the initial procurement. This transformation will follow the same pattern. The question is who builds it.