Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Musk’s political inclinations and the latest surprise disruptions to service in Ukraine, the Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are now facing urgent questions about how to move forward without it.
As the world’s largest communications satellite network, Starlink can typically support high-speed Internet and data streams for any user or vehicle equipped with a relatively compact Starlink terminal. This has enabled Ukraine to maintain vital communications for both civilian purposes and military operations—and has also expanded the Ukrainian military’s capability to remotely control or provide guidance to drones used in both air defense against Russian attacks and for striking back at Russian targets.
“Starlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use,” according to the head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech, who provided comments to Ars anonymously for security reasons. “In practical terms, the main limitation is the need to position the antenna so it can receive signals from the satellites.”
Here is a number worth sitting with: federal teams seized roughly 700 drones around World Cup venues this summer. Seven hundred — at one tournament, in one season, with the best-resourced counter-drone units in the world on the field. That figure is a success story and a warning in the same breath: the threat volume is enormous, and the federal government cannot be the only team suiting up for it.
Until this year, it legally had to be. The power to disable a hostile drone belonged to a short list of federal agencies, which left a state trooper at a stadium gate or a corrections captain watching an aircraft hover over his yard with nothing but binoculars and a report form. Congress ended that with the SAFER SKIES Act in December's defense bill, and the DHS-Justice framework implementing it has been in force since July 1: state, local, tribal, and territorial police and corrections agencies that complete federal training and certification, on approved equipment, can now track a threatening drone and — against a credible threat — take it out of the sky above major venues, critical infrastructure, and prisons.
And in the past week, Washington has shown it means to deliver. The Justice Department announced that the FBI's counter-drone training center in Huntsville will double its capacity. DHS's Science and Technology Directorate put commercial counter-drone systems through operational testing alongside state and local officers. The Pentagon selected four directed-energy systems for a homeland counter-drone pilot. This is what implementation momentum looks like, and the departments deserve real credit for it.
Now the hard truth: doubling a small number produces a small number. The Huntsville center's first class, last fall, held twelve officers, and it remains the only place in America where a state or local officer can earn the legal right to bring down a drone. More than 18,500 agencies are now eligible for these authorities. Against that denominator, even a doubled schoolhouse leaves the vast majority of American communities exactly where they were — watching — while the Super Bowl arrives in four months and the Los Angeles Olympics in under two years. Our prisons cannot wait either: drone incidents at federal correctional facilities rose twentyfold in six years, and state systems from South Carolina to Georgia are logging airborne contraband runs by the hundreds.
What turns momentum into coverage is money, sustained past the current news cycle. Congress should fund training at the scale of the authority it created: regional and satellite course delivery so a deputy in Phoenix is not waiting on a classroom seat in Alabama, instructor pipelines that multiply the schoolhouse instead of merely enlarging it, and a certification target tied to the event calendar that oversight committees actually track. Just as important, the FEMA counter-UAS grant program — $500 million across 2026 and 2027, built around the World Cup — should not sunset with the tournament that inspired it. The threat is not leaving when the fans do.
Governors have their own homework, and fewer excuses than ever: the grant rules push at least 97 percent of awarded funds down to local and tribal agencies within 45 days. The money is designed to reach the street. States should name a lead agency, compete for those dollars this cycle, and put their corrections systems and stadium districts first in line for certified teams.
Over more than twenty years in federal homeland security — the last of them leading U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — I watched threats outrun statutes again and again. This time the statute arrived first, and this past week proved the executive branch intends to use it. The remaining question belongs to Congress and fifty governors: whether a nation that just confiscated 700 drones at a single sporting event will fund protection for everyone else. Authority without capacity is a promise. Appropriations are how promises get kept.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing—taking a step beyond the US military’s decades of experimentation with similar concepts.
The drone evacuation of the injured soldier took place at an undisclosed time and place on the frontline where the presence of Russian drones and landmines made it impractical to send in a wheeled ground robot, according to The Kyiv Independent. On October 19, Ukraine’s Army shared a video of the drone evacuation, showing the wounded soldier securing himself in a harness suspended beneath a heavy hexacopter drone with six rotors before being flown to safety.
“This is a historic event, the next stage of evacuating the wounded, which we will all come to,” said Napalm, a programmer of the 92nd separate assault brigade's unmanned ground systems company, who went by his callsign per Ukrainian military practice, in a statement. “Now the serious systematic work begins, so that such missions are carried out constantly.”
Technically all that you need in order to make a drone fly is a single motor and single propeller, but realistically it becomes basically impossible to fly it at that point. In the case of helicopters you therefore need a second rotor somewhere to provide counterbalance to the first and to be able to steer.
There are of course a number of ways to make a drone fly with a single helicopter, but the compromise usually is to use very large propellers, as well as other mechanisms that make for a very large drone. This wasn’t good enough for [Joshua Bird] who wanted to have a very small, single propeller drone.
Key to making it work is not only a very high RPM, but also a hinged propeller hub that manipulates the angle of the blades in such a way that both pitch and roll can be controlled if you react quickly enough. This turned out to be impossible using standard motor ESCs that do not directly measure the motor’s speed and position but rely on back EMF.
In the final prototype of the drone such details had to be measured directly, with super-fast adjustments to the motor’s speed only possible with custom controller code and a lot of trial and error. Even then the drone would often lose track of its position and crash once more. The solution there was to add an infrared beacon in the room and a sensor on the drone, to give it a fixed reference point.
You can find the project files so far on the GitHub project page, with upcoming changes to the drone design involving improvements like adding a scanner to the drone so that it can autonomously use features in its environment as fixed reference points. That way it might conceivably be able to fly outside as well, which would be quite exciting to see.
Russian drones are suspected of sinking a cargo ship and leaving chemical tankers ablaze near the Black Sea coasts of Bulgaria and Romania, respectively. The latest attacks mean that at least seven ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—and even within Romania's territorial waters if Russian involvement is confirmed in the case of the chemical tankers.
Such attacks have spurred requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection. In a social media post on October 15, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stated that NATO had increased "counter-drone capabilities" along the alliance's eastern flank after meeting with the leaders of Bulgaria and Romania.
The latest attacks this week occurred within 24 hours between October 14 and October 15, when the two chemical tankers were set afire after Russian drones were detected in Romanian airspace, according to Deutsche Welle. Both ships were sitting at anchor near the mouth of the Sulina canal that connects the Black Sea to the Danube River, which has become a crucial shipping export route for Ukraine, Reuters reported.
Suspected Russian drone attacks sank a cargo ship and forced the evacuation of another vessel within two dozen miles of the coast of Bulgaria in the Black Sea on October 13. The latest attacks mean that five ships have been attacked in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries—spurring requests for NATO to redeploy counter-drone systems to provide more protection.
Although there is no hard proof that the drone attacks originated from Russia, one of the ships that came under attack was the Ukrainian-operated coastal freighter Chelsea 3, registered under the flag of Malta. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev told the Russian ambassador in Sofia that “it makes no sense for Ukraine to destroy its own ships in the Black Sea, and the results of these strikes favor Russia’s interests,” according to The Associated Press.
All 15 members of the Ukrainian-owned Chelsea 3 were safely evacuated by Bulgarian rescue operations after the ship was reportedly struck by three aerial drones.
— Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of 911 response drones, has named Joe Levy chief revenue officer. Levy joins from Peregrine, a public safety data platform, and early in his career was a drill sergeant and combat engineer for the U.S. Army Reserve.
Levy praised the Brinc team, saying, “They’re passionate about what they do with a vision that will change the public safety landscape. I’m grateful to join them and help scale what they’ve built.”
Brinc announced a $125 million funding round in July, bringing its total raised to more than $280 million. The startup is hiring for numerous roles and is No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
Jessie Minton. (Fred Hutch Photo)
— Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Jessie Minton vice president and chief digital and information officer, a new position that brings the roles together.
Former Chief Data Officer Jeff Leek stepped down and is now a professor in the Fred Hutch Public Health Sciences Division and CEO of Synthesize Bio, a startup he co-founded in 2023. Last month, Fred Hutch announced Shawn Stapleton as VP and chief AI and innovation officer, another new role.
Minton joins from Washington University in St. Louis where she has been vice chancellor for technology and chief information officer since 2022. She was previously VP and CIO at the University of Oregon.
Fred Hutch praised Minton’s track record “of modernizing complex technology organizations, strengthening cybersecurity, governing large-scale Epic environments and aligning technology strategy with clinical, research and academic priorities.” The new role is effective Dec. 7.
Jason (JJ) James. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Jason (JJ) James has been named chief information officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners. James has more than 25 years in technology leadership and was previously CIO at companies including Aptos Retail, Net Health and Optima Healthcare Solutions.
“My focus is putting AI to work across Acumatica while keeping security at the core, so we can move fast without compromising the trust our expanding community of customers, partners and developers places in us,” James said in a statement.
Andrew Bennett. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Seattle tech leader Andrew Bennett has joined San Francisco-based Motiveas chief marketing officer. Bennett was with Smartsheet for a decade, leaving as CMO in 2024. He is also a limited partner with the investment firm Stage 2 Capital.
Motive provides software, hardware and AI-powered tools to help businesses manage physical fleets of vehicles and heavy equipment.
— Steven Chen has left LinkedIn, where he served as director and head of corporate legal and sustainability, to become a senior director at Rubrik.
— Seattle-based LevelTen Energy, a startup facilitating the deployment of clean energy projects, has appointed John Barrow as director of a new initiative enabling the purchase and sale of data center projects under development.
Barrow joins from CyrusOne, a global data center developer and operator, and was with CPS Energy for more than 15 years.
“In my career, I’ve had a front-row seat to the data center boom,” Barrow said. Participants are struggling to quickly secure locations and energy, he said, adding that LevelTen “can solve those problems for industry participants at scale.”
— Certivo, a Seattle startup building technology to automate supply chain compliance, has named Jeffrey Bornstein to its board. Bornstein was with GE for nearly three decades and served in roles including vice chairman and chief financial officer.
“He has run the numbers for some of the most complex industrial supply chains in the world while regulators checked every one of them,” said Certivo CEO Kunal Chopra. Certivo is No. 194 on the GeekWire 200.
Convera leadership, from left: Mike Cahill, Jon Southall, Tui Allen and Chris Steinig. (Convera Photo)
— Convera, a Seattle-based fintech company helping businesses transfer money across borders, has added to its leadership team. All four will work out of Convera’s other offices.
Mike Cahill has been appointed EVP and chief operating officer after joining in June as interim chief product and technology officer. Past employers include Early Warning Services, the company behind Zelle, as well as PayPal, Boku and American Express.
Jon Southallhas been named SVP and chief technology officer. He joins from PayPal and has also worked for Boku and Braintree.
Tui Allenhas joined as SVP and chief product officer. She previously worked for employers including Ticketmaster, Shopify and Blackbaud.
Chris Steinig has been named CIO after leading Convera’s technology operations for four years.
— Portable Consultants a Redmond, Wash., enterprise telecommunications and data connectivity provider, has named two leaders.
Carrie Ferrero has joined as VP of product and marketing development. She previously served as VP of sales engineering at Connectbase.
Troy Brockway has been named director of client development, joining from SpikeUp Media.
— Reperio Health, a Portland, Ore., startup bringing preventive health check-ups into the home, has named Brad Nations to its board of directors. Nations is CEO and founder of JB Advisory.
— iQmetrix, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company building point-of-sale and retail management software for cell phone and wireless stores, has appointed Beniamin Longodor as VP of global growth. Longodor, who is based in Austria, was previously with NTS Retail.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks before President Donald Trump at an event for Anduril Industries, Inc., at Sparrows Point Shipyard, Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026, in Sparrows Point, Md. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Welcome to The Iron Triangle, the Cipher Brief column serving Procurement Officers tasked with buying the future, Investors funding the next generation of defense technology, and the Policy Wonks analyzing its impact on the global order.
On the night of April 24, 1980, eight Navy RH-53D Sea Stallions lifted off the deck of the USS Nimitz and headed for a patch of Iranian salt flat called Desert One. The plan needed six of them to get there in working order. One was abandoned in the desert after a rotor warning. One turned back in a dust storm. One arrived with a failed hydraulic system. The mission was aborted. Then, while the force repositioned to refuel, a helicopter drifted into an EC-130. Eight Americans died on that salt flat, and fifty-two hostages stayed in Tehran.
When the Secretary of War stood at Quantico on September 30 and announced a new four-star command for autonomous warfare, my first question was not about drones. It was about helicopters.
The Holloway review found the mission "conceptually valid and feasible" and blamed "the ad hoc nature of the organization and planning." The fix, Nunn-Cohen in 1986, gave the new Special Operations Command a budget line the services could not raid. We did eventually build better helicopter units. But we didn't build SOCOM around a helicopter. We built it around the problem that broke the helicopters.
The Secretary seems to understand this. "Ukraine's lesson is not that one type of drone wins wars," Hegseth told the room, "but rather the need for a purpose-built system that maximizes the ability to adapt." His signed memo says the output "is not a particular drone, but the ability to adapt in combat." Then the Department named it the Autonomous Warfare Command. This is like naming SOCOM the Helicopter Command. A drone is a photograph of an adaptation. The adaptation is the movie. In Ukraine, radio-controlled FPVs gave way to fiber-optic spools, which gave way to nets, shotguns and interceptor drones, each turn in weeks or months.
When the 3rd Army Corps air-dropped ground robots ten kilometers behind Russian lines during Operation Vivaldi last month, the footage went everywhere. The commanders talked about something else. A battalion commander known as "Darwin," credited a command structure "qualified enough as we are." An American volunteer with the corps described his entire job as "installing Western mission command trust and initiative." We taught them that. They are teaching it back to us with robots, and we are taking notes on the robots.
Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling warns that "creating a headquarters does not create a capability." He is right, and that is the point of this column. The memo orders a 30-day implementation plan, due on the Secretary's desk around the end of October. A headquarters is a wiring diagram. The capability is a soldier in the motor pool at two in the morning with a soldering iron, a laptop and a firmware image that does not work yet. Here is how to build him, keep him and turn him loose.
Start With the Soldier We Already Have
The Army has made a great start. Its newest specialty, the 15X tactical unmanned aircraft system specialist, is graduating classes of about thirty at Fort Huachuca, with 770 expected by year's end and a planned force of two to three thousand. The colonel who runs the training brigade said it better than anyone at Quantico: "The Army has not bought a drone that the 15X is responsible for being an expert on." Train the soldier to learn the machine, not the machine's manual.
Now follow that soldier for six years. If he is good, he makes sergeant. If he is very good, he makes staff sergeant, and the day he pins it on, his job stops being the drone and starts being the eight soldiers who fly it: counseling, evaluations, ranges and the duty roster. The enlisted promotion system has one ladder, and it runs through the leadership of people. The best technician in the platoon either becomes a manager or gets passed over. Either way he leaves the bench, and the private sector is waiting with a better offer.
Bring Back the Specialist
Warrant officers exist to solve part of this problem. The Army already has an unmanned aircraft systems warrant, and the Air Force, which abolished its warrants in 1959, brought them back in December 2024 for cyber, intelligence and space. But warrants are a thin layer by design. You do not put one in every platoon, and the loop the Secretary described lives in the squad and the section.
The Army has solved this before. In 1955, after a committee recommended separating command from technical responsibility, it created specialist grades to reward experience and technical knowledge. A Specialist Six drew a staff sergeant's pay without a staff sergeant's squad. His job was to be the most technically proficient in the building, and the Army paid him to stay that way. The ladder was dismantled from the top down, and in 1985 SP5 and SP6 went away.
Bring them back, starting with unmanned systems. Promote a Specialist Five or Six on what he can build, fix, modify and teach. Same pay grades, separate ladder, one rule: technical authority, never command. Put specialists in every formation that flies, drives or swims a robot, with the warrant corps above them as the technical chain. A Specialist Six at battalion who can rewrite the flight controller tonight, and a CW3 at brigade who knows which vendor to call in the morning: that is what a fix in days looks like.
Pay for the Skill, Not the Stripe
We already pay soldiers for perishable expertise. A linguist earns a Foreign Language Proficiency Bonus of up to $500 a month per language, and must retest every year to keep it. Nobody thinks that is strange. Russian is hard, and it fades.
So does firmware. Build a tiered certification for unmanned systems (repair, modify, program) and pay it monthly, with an annual retest, because the skill expires as fast as the drones do. The money does not need an act of Congress. Under 37 U.S.C. 353, a service Secretary can designate any skill as critical and pay up to $1,750 a month in skill incentive pay, or a proficiency bonus of up to $55,000 a year for certified proficiency. The authority is sitting on the shelf.
Then add the cheapest incentive in the Army's inventory: a badge. The 1953 committee that produced the specialist grades was worried about prestige, and prestige in the Army is worn on the chest. Anyone who has watched soldiers grind through an Expert Infantryman Badge lane knows what they will do for a piece of metal. An expert badge for unmanned systems, tested on build, fix and fly against the clock, would cost almost nothing and fill every off-duty hour in the brigade.
Recruit at the Bench
In June 2025, the Army commissioned four technology executives directly as reserve lieutenant colonels. Now do it at the other end of the org chart. Let a civilian FPV builder or embedded-systems engineer enlist as a Specialist Five instead of a private, on a skills test rather than a resume.
And stop leaving the best reservoir untapped. Thousands of Americans now build drones for a living. The Guard and Reserve can put them in uniform one weekend a month as technical specialists, carrying current industry skill into units without the Army having to match a Silicon Valley salary.
Give Them Permission and a Parts Budget
A specialist who can fix the drone but is not allowed to innovate is an expensive spectator. In April 2025 the Secretary's own Army transformation memo directed the service to "seek to include right to repair provisions in all existing contracts." Finish the job, then delegate the authority to modify and fly small systems down to brigade, so a fix written tonight does not wait months for a distant office to approve it.
Then give him money. The Army's UAS Marketplace, launched in March, has already cleared more than $750 million in sales, and it is adding components and software. Ukraine went further: drone units earn points for verified strikes and spend them on the Brave1 Market, a catalog of more than a thousand products. We do not need the kill leaderboard. We need the principle. Put a parts budget and a catalog in the hands of the battalion specialist, because the fix usually costs less than the paperwork.
Train the Whole Chain
Technical acumen cannot stop at the specialist. The lieutenant has to know what to ask for, and the battalion commander has to know when a twenty-year-old is telling him something he does not want to hear. Put a hands-on unmanned systems block in the officer basic and captains career courses. Send specialists to vendor factories through Training With Industry, and bring vendor engineers forward to battalion in return. Then rate commanders on how fast their formations close the loop.
For the Procurement Officer
Before you sign, ask one question: can a twenty-two-year-old with a screwdriver and a laptop legally open this, fix it and reflash it at two in the morning? If the answer is a field service rep and a ticket number, you did not buy a capability. You rented one. Price the technical data, the open interfaces and the soldier training as line items, and count how many of your fielded systems a Specialist Six could actually work on today.
The Investment Thesis
Your next customer is a Specialist Six. Buying power is already drifting down to the units, through marketplaces here and points in Ukraine. The company with the best drone of 2026 is a commodity supplier by 2027. The company the soldier chooses to learn on, train on and fix with is a platform. Discount revenue built on dependency, and pay up for iteration speed.
The Policy Wonk's Warning
The memo says plainly that the Department will need legislation for the command itself. When the FY2028 NDAA takes it up, Congress should do for adaptation what Nunn-Cohen did for special operations: a protected budget line, and a statutory charter that defines the mission as adaptation across the force, not ownership of a category of hardware. Most of the personnel fixes above need no new law at all. Congress's job is to ask why they have not happened yet.
My Take.
The fight over this command will happen in a document most people will never read. The 30-day plan must "identify measures of adaptation and Service adoption." That clause is where AUTOWARCOM is won or lost. If adaptation is measured in drones delivered, the command becomes a very expensive purchasing agent. Measure two numbers instead: days from a unit reporting a battlefield problem to a fix in its hands, and the count of soldiers in each formation certified to make that fix. Report both to Congress every quarter. Owen West and Max Strasiser built their reputations on speed. I suspect they would welcome being graded on it.
The Risk.
The specialist ranks went away for reasons. Old soldiers still tell stories about the Spec Five who drew sergeant's pay and could not, or would not, run a detail, and about the confusion over who was in charge when the sergeant went down. The bright line between technical authority and command answers most of that. Delegating authority to modify means some soldiers will break drones. That is the tuition, and it is cheaper than the alternative. The bigger risk is the one Hertling named: a new headquarters that adds a layer between the operator and the vendor. If the 30-day plan is mostly wiring diagram and very little soldier, believe him.
Conclusion
Hegseth told the room at Quantico that the English at Agincourt moved their fletchers close to the front to keep the arrows coming. The fletchers were not archers. They were tradesmen, kept near the line because the arrows ran out faster than anyone had planned. In a few weeks, the plan on the Secretary's desk will tell us whether we understood the story. Will we count drones, or will we count days, and the soldiers who make them shorter?
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
“If a Coco robot can make its way and deliver goods and services from one place to another, surely your Army can figure this out,” Army CTO Alex Miller said.
U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Northington, Joint Task Force Southern Guard force protection noncommissioned officer in charge, demonstrates counter unmanned aerial system capabilities at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Aug. 4, 2025. Counter UAS’s are used to offset the operation challenges and threats posed by UAS’s. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Natalie Rubenak)
When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia’s digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia’s centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the “data center war” it started, according to poststranslated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine’s decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia’s system if the countries continue trading such blows.
Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine’s power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks.
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.
The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”
Walmart and Wing are partnering on drone delivery service that is expanding across the U.S. (Walmart Photo)
Walmart looks like it might beat Amazon to the skies over the Seattle area as the retail giant announced this week that it plans to bring automated drone delivery to the region in 2027.
The move is part of a broader nationwide push by Walmart and drone operator Wing — a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet — to scale across nearly 20 U.S. metropolitan areas. By adding Seattle and Denver in its latest expansion push, the partnership aims to eventually offer 30-minute aerial delivery from more than 270 Walmart stores coast-to-coast, reaching over 40 million potential customers.
Details on which Seattle-area stores will offer the service have not yet been announced. There are no Walmart stores within Seattle city limits, but The Seattle Times reported that permit filings point to initial groundwork underway at store locations in Federal Way and Tacoma.
Federal Way Mayor Jim Ferrell said his community south of Seattle is looking forward to bringing the region “an incredible new convenience” with the advanced delivery solutions.
“The future has arrived and its being delivered by Walmart by drone!” Ferrell said in a news release.
Wing’s electric aircraft fly at speeds up to 60 mph, serving homes within a six-mile radius of participating stores. The drones carry payloads up to five pounds to drop household essentials from groceries to small electronics. Once operational, eligible local shoppers using either the Walmart or Wing app will automatically see airborne drops as a checkout option.
KIRO 7 captured a demonstration of Wing’s delivery system in Bellevue this week, showcasing how the aircraft take off and raise and lower orders.
While Seattle-based Amazon has pushed aggressively to expand its Prime Air drone fleet to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns, the tech giant has yet to launch commercial drone deliveries in its hometown. Instead, Prime Air operations remain concentrated in markets like Arizona, Texas, and Florida.
Amazon isn’t ignoring the Pacific Northwest entirely, however. The Portland Business Journal reported last month that Amazon filed permit applications to build a Prime Air hub at a North Portland facility, targeting an early 2027 launch that has already drawn early pushback from nearby residents concerned about noise and safety.
Those noise concerns mirror a broader backlash taking shape in established test markets. The New York Times and others reported last month on residents living beneath Amazon’s drone flight paths in Richardson, Texas, who have taken exception to the constant low-altitude buzz of delivery aircraft disrupting their suburban way of life.
Wing has sought to head off potential noise backlash by re-engineering its aircraft acoustic profile. According to the company, its latest drones feature custom propellers designed to reduce high-pitched whines, keeping sound levels at roughly 43 to 50 decibels at cruising altitude and around 62 decibels during hovering drops — a level Wing claims is quieter than a standard delivery truck.
But Walmart and Wing have still encountered friction at the local level. In metro Atlanta, county leaders shut down a proposed Walmart drone hub after more than 1,000 nearby residents signed a petition citing noise, safety, and privacy concerns.
On September 30, at Quantico, the Secretary of War announced a four-star command for autonomous warfare. The memorandum behind it is two pages long. It gives two officials 30 days to produce a plan and sets October 1, 2027, as the day the Autonomous Warfare Command stands up. “We do not have a decade,” it says.
On the same day, a California company announced a Pentagon order for 14,000 small attack drones, along with 800 more reallocated from competitors that could not meet their production deadlines. First-round deliveries had been running late, the trade press reported, because the motors, batteries, sensors, and chips that American law will accept were in short supply.
Five weeks ago in these pages I argued that America was buying an army it could not command. The Hegseth memorandum is the most serious answer that argument has received. It settles who buys, and it leaves to the 30-day plan who decides between theaters when the systems run short. It is silent on a prior question. Before a force can be commanded, it has to be built, and this one is being built from parts supplied by the adversary.
The official now charged with building the command has said so to the Senate. “Many of the subcomponents,” Owen West told the Armed Services Committee in March, “do today come from China,” and he put American or allied supply “deep in 2027.” China makes roughly nine of every ten rare-earth magnets in the world. The largest American producer told investors in August that demand for the magnets inside drone motors is met “essentially 100 percent in China.” An American-made drone motor costs $100 to $225; the Chinese equivalent costs $12 to $25. The memorandum asks for a force on “the right side of the cost exchange.” For now, that exchange is priced in Chinese factories.
The trade truce does not reach any of this. Beijing’s ban on dual-use exports to American military users has been in effect since December 2024 and has never been suspended. In June, China added two American magnet makers and a drone manufacturer to its export-control list. The truce itself was extended in September to January 10, yet the notice that suspends China’s rare-earth licensing rules still expires, on paper, on November 10. That is eight days before the President is due in Shenzhen, where he will arrive as the customer for the magnets his own deterrent requires. Beijing does not need an embargo to use this. It needs only to let a notice lapse, and its magnet shipments to the United States had already fallen 21 percent in August.
Washington has set a date of its own. On January 1, the Pentagon’s rule barring Chinese-origin magnets from defense supply chains takes effect. For most of next year, Chinese parts will be barred by both governments while American ones are not yet made in volume. That stretch falls in 2027, the close of the Davidson Window, the year American commanders have named since 2021 as the one by which Beijing wants the option of force against Taiwan. The force meant to deter China in 2027 depends, through 2027, on China’s willingness to keep selling to it.
The picture is not hopeless. Magnet plants in South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas are shipping or commissioning, the Army has contracted for millions of magnet segments for drone motors, and in March Ukraine built a drone with no Chinese components at all. The capacity is real. It is also early and expensive, and no one has been given the authority to decide who gets it first.
The money runs through the same gap. In the week the command was ordered, hiring all but stalled, and the 30-year Treasury still ended near its highest yield in 24 years, while France, Germany, and Japan set multi-decade highs. The savers who finance American deficits can now earn more at home. In the same fortnight, Washington threatened to cut anyone servicing Iranian airlines out of the dollar system and warned two allies that American diesel might stop coming. The country is spending the dollar’s leverage abroad while asking the world to finance its rearmament.
That is the economic-warfare lesson inside a defense memorandum. China’s leverage is exercised by a commerce ministry, with a notice, at a time of its choosing. America’s answer is divided among a portfolio office that buys, Services that supply the forces, a Congress that has not written the law or appropriated $53.6 billion of the $54.6 billion requested, and a Treasury borrowing at its highest long-term rates since 2002. Each is competent. As I wrote here last week on the economic front, none is in command.
The plan due around October 30 is the place to change that, and it turns on two decisions. The first is supply. When American-made magnets, motors, and batteries are scarce, as they will be for most of 2027, someone must decide which programs and which theaters receive them, and that decision must bind the Services and suppliers alike. The instrument exists; the priority ratings of the Defense Production Act were written for exactly this.
The second is integration. As this series has argued, the artificial intelligence on which such a force depends must operate at the tactical edge. A drone that cannot compute there and is not connected through a common command-and-control architecture to everything else in the fight is not a capability. It is one more unintegrated system handed to the warfighter, another problem to manage under fire, and one the adversary will render obsolete, because what cannot be integrated cannot adapt.
Supply, integration, and deployment are one problem. Washington has divided it among separate offices, and no one owns the whole. If you have a hand in that plan, see that it names who holds each authority and sets the supply and integration schedules beside the fielding schedule. Otherwise, the command will stand up on time next October with an order book and no arsenal.
Richard Berry is the founder and principal of Stratnova Advisors and a former Commander’s Action Group Director at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command; he publishes the weekly assessment Strategic Horizons.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
The X-BAT autonomous fighter jet will be built at a new facility in Washington state. Renderings and images via Shield AI.
DES MOINES, Wash. — Defense tech powerhouse Shield AI is establishing a massive advanced manufacturing hub in Washington state, tapping the Seattle region’s deep aerospace and tech roots to build a next-generation autonomous fighter jet called the X-BAT.
The project could transform the regional labor market: Shield AI says it expects to have 4,000 workers in the region by the early 2030s as it ramps up mass production of the AI-piloted, 26-foot long aircraft.
It marks a major expansion of advanced aerospace manufacturing in the Seattle region, bringing autonomous military aviation directly into Boeing’s backyard and cementing the state’s position at the center of the AI-defined defense era.
The San Diego-based company, valued at $12.7 billion following a $2 billion venture capital round earlier this year, is looking to complete construction on a 420,000-square-foot facility in Des Moines, Wash., just south of Seattle, next spring.
That physical footprint is expected to grow quickly. Armor Harris, senior vice president of aircraft at Shield AI, told GeekWire that the company is actively looking to add another 1 million square feet in the region to support its long-term manufacturing push.
Named X-Forge 3, the initial facility will serve as the primary manufacturing and engineering center for the X-BAT. It’s now under construction about 15 minutes south of Sea-Tac airport in the Des Moines Creek Business Park West, at 1800 S 216th St.
Developed by Panattoni, the site was selected by Shield AI midway through construction. The company is now taking it to completion, with Harris noting that they are “putting the roof on right now.”
Shield AI’s new X-Forge 3 facility south of Sea-Tac airport is currently under construction with an opening date slated for next Spring.
Unveiled last year, the X-BAT is an AI-piloted strike fighter that takes off and lands vertically, carries up to 2,000-pound class weapons in internal bays, and is designed for a 1,000-nautical-mile combat radius — which, when it takes flight, would top the estimated 590 nautical mile combat radius of the Lockheed Martin F-35A.
An economic analysis released by the company estimates Shield AI’s X-BAT program will inject roughly $73 billion into Washington state’s economy over the next two decades as production scales toward full capacity. Projections provided by the company say up to 27,000 direct and indirect jobs — including suppliers — will be generated by the expansion by 2046.
“This is a large program,” said Harris in an interview with GeekWire. “Building a next generation fighter jet is no small endeavor, and with the amount of interest that we’ve seen, both from our U.S. government customers and from international customers, we could be looking at building these at rates greater than fighter jets have been built in a really long time.”
Harris said he expects the first X-BAT aircraft to roll off the line in Des Moines in 2028, with full production ramping up to about 150 aircraft per year by the early 2030s.
The company evaluated more than a dozen sites for the facility, and chose the Seattle area for a simple reason: talent.
Harris cited the region’s robust aerospace legacy, as well as technology giants like Amazon and Microsoft and a burgeoning space and satellite industry which has taken shape in recent years. A number of fast-growing and heavily funded defense tech companies — including Anduril, Armada and Nominal — have also established beachheads in the region in recent years.
He described the X-BAT as a “modern sixth-generation fighter jet” that’s essentially a “flying sensor suite,” ingesting information in real time in order to make lightning-fast decisions.
Deep aviation and technology roots
Building that type of aircraft takes a very specialized workforce, one that Harris said is rooted across technology, aerospace, artificial intelligence, materials science and advanced manufacturing. Those are major strengths of the Seattle area workforce.
“We’re able to tap into that existing lineage and not have to necessarily train a workforce from the ground up, which would be hard to do on the timelines we’re trying to execute,” said Harris, who is planning to relocate to Washington state from Dallas.
To support its ambitious production schedule, Shield AI is actively recruiting across both software engineering and specialized aerospace roles. The initial hiring push for the Des Moines facility spans autonomy developers, flight-control software engineers, composite technicians, and shop-floor assembly specialists.
In one job listing for an engineering manager to lead the X-BAT hardware test software team, the company notes that the ideal candidate “has personally built or led the development of automated hardware test systems used in production, manufacturing, qualification, or other high-consequence environments.”
In another Seattle area job listing for a staff fuel engineer, the company says it is looking for a someone with “strong thermofluid fundamentals, engineering judgment, and the ability to understand fuel system behavior across demanding aircraft operating conditions while serving as the focal point between propulsion, vehicle teams, suppliers, and flight operations.”
Pay across those engineering roles ranges from $169,000 to $300,000 annually, according to the company job postings.
The company currently lists more than 110 open roles in the Seattle area, including a dozen or more in categories such as avionics and electrical; mechanical and thermal; software and networks; and aerostructures.
Choosing Washington also allowed Shield AI to buck a pervasive defense industry trend: separating engineering teams from physical factory floors to shave down labor costs.
While shifting assembly lines to lower-cost regions can cut costs, Harris said that remote manufacturing introduces hidden operational friction when building complex, software-defined aircraft like the X-BAT.
“We fundamentally believe in the colocation of engineering and production is the fastest way to bring capability to our customers,” said Harris, adding that combining engineering and production in a common facility is “one of the secret sauces of Shield.”
In a statement, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) — whose district includes Des Moines — welcomed Shield AI and the X-BAT manufacturing facility to King County.
“This hub will create high-quality jobs, strengthen Puget Sound’s expanding technology and aerospace sectors, and further diversify our local economy,” Smith said. “Reimagining aviation will have a rightful home here in Washington’s Ninth District.”
Katherine Caffrey, the city manager for City of Des Moines, welcomed the new jobs and economic investment in the community.
“Des Moines sits at the heart of the Puget Sound aerospace industry, and these jobs and this investment reflects exactly what we want Des Moines to be, a place where families can build strong careers close to home,” Caffrey said.
The ‘holy grail of deterrence’
Shield AI officially introduced the X-BAT program to the public at an October 2025 event in Washington, D.C., unveiling the aircraft before an audience of military leaders, elected officials and defense industry partners.
At the time, Shield AI co-founder and president Brandon Tseng, a former Navy SEAL, called X-BAT a “transformative, runway-independent aircraft” and noted that “airpower without runways is the holy grail of deterrence.”
That vision quickly gained momentum.
Last month, the U.S. Navy backed the program through an initial $50 million development contract, envisioning the autonomous fighter jets operating directly from destroyers, amphibious assault ships and converted cargo vessels to project long-range airpower without relying on traditional aircraft carriers.
Shield AI recently won a contract with the U.S. Navy for the X-BAT, designed to take off and land vertically.
That momentum grew internationally earlier this month, when Shield AI signed a five-year letter of intent with Polish defense companies PGZ and WZL-2. Under the framework, the companies are exploring plans to help build, supply, and repair the X-BAT, a partnership that could give NATO allies a fighter jet capable of operating even if local airfields and runways are destroyed or non-existent.
The X-BAT launches and lands vertically using a specialized Launch and Recovery Vehicle —a mobile trailer that erects the jet vertically, allowing it to be towed on interstate highways or loaded onto cargo ships to set up a field launch pad in minutes.
Harris noted that while a final site selection for manufacturing the LRV trailers has not been made, expanding production into the Puget Sound region remains on the table given the area’s deep manufacturing base.
In addition to the mammoth manufacturing facility in Des Moines, Shield AI announced that it is expanding its presence in both Texas and Kansas.
In Frisco, Texas, the company operates its X-Forge 1 site to handle core prototyping, software integration, and initial engineering for the autonomous fighter. Meanwhile, at X-Forge 2 in Newton, Kansas, Shield AI has expanded its airport footprint to serve as the program’s dedicated flight test, customer acceptance and maintenance hub.
Shield AI expects its X-Forge 2 site in Kansas to support approximately 1,800 regional jobs by the early 2030s, growing to 2,900 positions by 2046 with a projected $5 billion in regional economic impact over that period.
Addressing the cross-country logistics of moving completed aircraft from the Puget Sound assembly line to Kansas for flight testing, Harris explained that the X-BAT can be easily moved via the existing transportation corridors.
“The X-BAT is designed to be road transportable,” he said. “So we’re taking advantage of that.”
Beyond the immediate manufacturing logistics, Harris views the multi-billion-dollar expansion as a major long-term validation of the region’s industrial relevance.
“There’s been a strong narrative of like, ‘Hey, all the jobs are migrating elsewhere,’ and I think this is a big win for the region to capture a major program from a rapidly growing company like this,” Harris said. “This can be the backbone for years of growth in the future.”
That’s a message that Gov. Bob Ferguson is getting behind, saying Washington state is a place where “big ideas take flight.”
“Shield AI’s decision to build its new X-BAT manufacturing facility here is another sign that the future of aerospace is being built in Washington,” Ferguson said in a statement. “We welcome Shield AI and the thousands of good-paying jobs this investment will bring.”
“Twenty years ago, the state of North Dakota poured in multiple millions of dollars to figure out what it looks like to do beyond visual line-of-sight operations for Class One, Two, and Three Drones. That was just the very nascent stage. Just a decade ago, ten years ago, they figured out that they can do this. They could do this at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Right across from our [air base] runway, on the active duty side, is a place called Grand Sky. It is an innovation research park for all counter-drone operations. It is one of the largest in the United States. They rent the space on our base. It's legitimately federal property that they lease for the research park.”
That was Air Force Col. Alfred J. Rosales, Commander, 319th Reconnaissance Wing, based at Grand Forks Air Force Base, speaking on September 14, at the 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference, as moderator of a panel on Counter-Drone Defense.
I had never heard about what the Grand Forks locals call GrandSKY as a home for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), where for a decade major defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and General Atomics have been flight testing and carrying out drone research and development.
Back in May, the Defense Department’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401, central authority for the counter-small unmanned aircraft systems program, selected five installations to participate in the directed-energy counter-unmanned aircraft systems pilot program, of which Grand Forks was one.
More recently, as Rosales put it, at the Grand Forks Base, they have been“strapping on vendor equipment” to “build tactics and techniques.” That process will help determine, he said, “How do we want directed-energy weapons to be used inside the United States in FAA [Federal Aviation Agency] controlled airspace, not in the restricted ranges of our Air Force.”
Rosales introduced his September 14, panel whom he said were industry leaders who were “translating technology into trust to allow us to win in the future.”
They were:
Dr. Ben Van Roo, Chief Executive Officer, Legion Intelligence, who, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) was working to get the equipment needed at the tactical level to be able to provide decision-making space without being connected to the Cloud the entire time.
Early on Van Roo said, “We're really still in the infancy right now of how we think about where we're going to use [computer] agents [AI]. What are we going to allow them to decide on? How do they work their way into our TTPs [Tactics, Techniques and Procedures] into our doctrine? And then, the other side, and the big question that we also think about is are they even going to be available?”
Van Roo continued, “The way that we want to use Artificial Intelligence is going to be one, it's still got to be sorted out. What are we going to allow these things [AI] decide to do? Where are they going to work? Into everything from the kill chain to just basic intelligence gathering? And then how are we going to make them more resilient? These are the next layers of challenges that are ahead of us.”
Adam Mohamed, Chief Technology Officer, Asylon Robotics, a Boston Dynamics Partner, who works on autonomous robotics, figuring out how we can layer base defense architecture with our air domain experts.
“Situational awareness is king,” Mohamed said, “because everything else flows from that. And having static situation awareness, mobile situational awareness, being able to understand your battle space is going to take precedence over everything else. The sensor fusion will happen. We'll have the AI. We'll have the ability to operate without a Cloud. But we need to be able to operate when we start losing our sensors, we start losing our radars, we start losing our shooters, and how do we adapt and how does the system adapt for you, because there won't be time for you to make the change to switch over.”
Colton Wood, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Force Technologies, who works on multi-sensor integration. How do we use AI to get the common operating pictures we so desperately desire -- the integration piece that's going to help defeat drones.
Wood said, “Talking about human in the loop is okay. I got a target, I need to go through the process of actually engaging and affecting that target. As we see the threat evolving, that is going to be an incredibly difficult thing to do if I have, you know, multiple threats, multiple targets, multiple different engagement systems…I've set all the rules of engagement. I've set the governance on the systems and then I have a strong decision supported by tools in front of me. But once I've made that decision, I need to be able to engage the systems and machines need to be able to engage the threats, almost autonomously.”
Therefore, Wood explained, “And so I think a lot of simulations, understanding how these systems operate, where the left and right limits are and then allowing these systems to be as effective as they can be without us having to shepherd the process is a very thing that we have to think about [in the] very near future here.”
And finally, Michael Hiatt, Chief Technology Officer, Epirus, who works with Directed-Energy weapons, lasers, the essence of kill-chain dynamics. He comes with skill sets on how to integrate and work in that space.
Hiatt said, “Your risk is very different if you have to literally put metal [kinetic weapons] in the air, you know, with kinetics or, you know, proximate-burst rounds or whatever the kinetic options are. If you can have an option that has lower collateral effects and no collateral damage, you know, which is what the Directed-Energy [DE, laser] weapons offer, you start to be able to change your risk calculation.”
Hiatt continued, “But when for the folks that are on the ground, you know, the battle captain trying to trying to make that assessment, it's not a cost asymmetry problem. It's a magazine depth issue because, you know, what's the reload time on my kinetic? What's the, you know, what's the fly-out time? How many do I, you know, what's my shot doctrine? Do I do a shoot, look, shoot? Do I do a shoot, shoot, look? You know, those are the things that affect magazine consumption.”
Hiatt added, “The reality is you know DE weapons aren't out-ranging kinetic [weapons]. And so when you start to say, ‘All right, I'm going to hold fire on my kinetics. I'm going to let that threat come in closer than I would like because I trust that my DE weapons are going to take it out.’ That's the level of trust that we got to get to.”
At the end of the 41-minute session, Col. Rosales tried to sum it up saying, “This space in counter drones is not a spectator sport. It's for all of us to think through it, industry, academia, the United States Air Force. What I hear is that we are beyond asking what these things are, AI agents, as they incorporate into this picture. We're at the point where we're figuring out what it could look like in terms of policy [so] that we can then get to the next step -- in training and exercising with a rigor to ensure that we have the trust to have our airmen engage when those courses of action are recommended.”
My guess is we are nowhere close to deciding policies where AI fits into the counter-drone fight, nor in warfare itself.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
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An Amazon Prime Air MK30 package delivery drone flying over a neighborhood. (Amazon Photo)
While Amazon touts its autonomous drone fleet as the ultimate convenience for rapid doorstep drop-offs, residents of one Texas neighborhood report a very different reality on the ground — complaining of lost privacy, non-stop outdoor disruption, and an incessant overhead hum that disrupts peaceful surroundings from morning until night.
New reports this week from The New York Times and NBC’s TODAY show detail how residents in Richardson, Texas, — a Dallas suburb near a major Amazon fulfillment facility — are bearing the brunt of Prime Air’s ambitious expansion.
“It’s constant — it’s like a beehive up there right over our house,” Richardson resident Scott Bratcher told NBC, describing his backyard as a virtual highway for drones.
The disruption has led others to tally the flyovers, including resident Stephanie Puri, who tracked 52 drone passes over her home on what she described to the Times as a “slow day,” adding that the noise penetrates her home even with the television turned on.
Under its Prime Air initiative, Amazon uses autonomous hexacopter drones — including its newer MK30 model designed to carry items up to five pounds — to fly directly from fulfillment sites to residential drop zones in 30 minutes or less.
Operating out of designated hubs, such as its Richardson facility, the e-commerce giant is rapidly scaling up its operations, with ambitious plans to expand drone deliveries to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026. (More details about who can order what via drone are available here.)
The tech giant defends the program as a resounding success, emphasizing that customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. An Amazon spokesperson told the Times and NBC that fewer than 1% of inquiries regarding Prime Air this year have related to noise, with the company maintaining that the sound on the ground is minimal, short-lived, and comparable to a low window fan or a passing car.
But for residents living directly beneath the designated flight paths, those low percentages offer little comfort.
Richardson homeowner Nikki Anderson told the Times that the frequent low-altitude flyovers have ruined an outdoor space her family once considered a peaceful sanctuary, forcing them indoors to escape the constant buzzing.
“Some people might think, wow, this is really, really cool, and the technology is really cool,” Anderson told the Times. “But people around here, we’re thinking, ‘Ugh, is there anything we can do to stop this?’ We can’t live like this.”
Other neighbors have echoed concerns over privacy and lingering safety questions, pointing to a crash earlier this year where a Prime Air drone collided with an apartment building in the area — an incident Amazon attributed to a GPS glitch before briefly pausing high-rise deliveries.
A package is loaded into an Amazon Prime Air drone. (Amazon Photo)
The clash in Richardson highlights a broader push across North Texas, which has rapidly become ground zero for commercial drone delivery in the U.S. Driven by favorable weather, sprawl, and state business incentives, Amazon is locked in an escalating “drone arms race” with rivals like Walmart, Alphabet’s Wing, and DoorDash, all of which are actively testing and scaling suburban drop-offs across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
Compounding the frustration for residents is the reality that municipal governments have virtually no authority to regulate the skies above their own neighborhoods. Because the Federal Aviation Administration holds sole jurisdiction over national airspace, local officials are powerless to restrict flight paths, set noise limits, or mandate higher altitudes.
A group of affected neighbors calling themselves the “drone warriors” has begun mobilizing to push back against the technology.
Using flight-tracking mobile apps, the residents closely monitor the overhead traffic while urging municipal leaders to enforce local rules, demand higher flight altitudes, and serve as a warning to other communities before the skies above their neighborhoods are similarly opened up.
“They need to do a lot more research, they need to hold Amazon accountable, we need to have rules,” Bratcher, the Richardson resident, said on TODAY. “And if they don’t follow the rules, take away their toys, turn them off.”
The U.S. Army has committed to a million small drones by 2028. The Department of Defense has not decided who will authorize how they fire.
That is not a materiel gap. The volume is on order; Nvidia’s latest earnings guidance says the compute to run it is on the way. It is a governance gap, and it is now the single largest exposure in the American national security posture entering the fourth quarter of 2026.
Consider what landed inside a seventy-two-hour window this week. On Tuesday, Nvidia posted $96.2 billion in second-quarter revenue, with $89 billion of it in the data-center segment and guided to $108 billion in the September quarter — an annualized run rate through American hyperscalers of more than $400 billion, the largest defense-adjacent capital cycle in modern history. The same day, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and RTX filed their responses to the Deputy Defense Secretary’s twenty-one-day production ultimatum on accelerated interceptor delivery. Nine days earlier, the Pentagon had opened the vendor portal for the $185 billion Golden Dome missile-defense program.
The chips are being funded. The primes are being pushed. The perimeter is being paid for. None of it tells you who decides when a fielded drone force pushes beyond its vendor’s safety rails during a live engagement.
That is not a hypothetical. Since March, the Department of Defense has formally designated Anthropic — the American AI lab whose Claude model is in active use within U.S. Defense environments — a “supply chain risk.” The two sides opened arguments in DC court over the blacklisting on May 19. In May, the Department expanded its classified AI work to eight companies, explicitly excluding Anthropic. On February 28, OpenAI took the other side of the same question, signing a deal to run its models on a Pentagon classified network. The day before, more than 580 Google employees, including DeepMind researchers, signed an open letter urging Google’s CEO to refuse the same kind of arrangement.
The industrial base of American artificial intelligence is not aligned on whether it will perform the classified work the drone doctrine assumes. The Pentagon’s response has been to fund compute, sign one lab, blacklist a second, and litigate.
Picture April 2027. A deployed American drone force is airborne over a contested Indo-Pacific corridor. A vendor safety guardrail on the targeting AI refuses a strike within a sixty-second window. The commander needs an override. No office at the Department of Defense — including the Chief Digital and AI Officer — holds explicit arbitration authority between the vendor’s guardrail and the commander’s judgment at operational tempo. The decision will be made ad hoc, by whichever lawyer or flag officer picks up the phone.
That is the arbitration gap. It is not the debt-service bill. It is not the interceptor shortfall. It is not even the shipbuilding backlog. It is the fact that the United States is standing up the largest defense-adjacent capital cycle in modern history — Golden Dome’s $185 billion, a million-drone target by 2028, and $1 billion for 340,000 attritable systems by 2027 — with no institutional authority designated to arbitrate how any of it fires. It is a supervisory function no institution has yet been chartered to perform, and no doctrine has yet been written to describe it.
Beijing runs the inverse problem. Paul Scharre laid out the industrial-base half of this argument in “Losing the War of the Future,” published in Foreign Affairs on June 23. What his piece understates is the demand side: even if the United States builds the drones, the doctrine and civil-military arbitration required to employ them do not yet exist at scale. The People’s Liberation Army’s answer is on the record. Three PLA researchers — Lieutenant Colonels Li Hengrui and Wang Haiyuan and Senior Colonel Cheng Jinming — published “all-domain megacity incapacitation warfare” in Military Art, the Central Military Commission’s restricted journal, in March 2025. Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga and Andrew Wang brought the article into the English-language conversation this summer in “Total War on Taipei,” published in War on the Rocks. The concept identifies the operational meaning of Xi Jinping’s “national total war” as an integrated arbitration architecture that fuses military, civilian, media, and party assets under a single narrative apparatus.
The PLA may struggle to execute it. The Central Military Commission, which began this term with seven members, has been reduced to two, hollowed out by disciplinary investigations. But the design is on the page. The American design is not.
Three signals will indicate by year-end whether the gap is closing or widening.
First, does the CDAO’s office designate a named override authority for wartime AI lab guardrails? Second, is the Anthropic-DoD blacklisting resolved into a joint framework for classified use, or does the litigation calcify? Third, does the FY27 defense-authorization conference name a joint force to operate Golden Dome, or fund the program without operator language? As of this week, all three are moving the wrong way.
The next war will not be lost because America bought the wrong drone. It will be lost because America bought the right one and never decided who could tell it to fire.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.
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During the week of March 9, drones came overBarksdale Air Force Base in waves. Barksdale is the home of the 2nd Bomb Wing, one of the places this country keeps its nuclear-capable bombers. The base issued a shelter-in-place order and stopped flight-line operations, and the Air Force has declined to say precisely how many aircraft were up there or who was flying them. NORTHCOM's counter-drone fly-away kit, the good one, the one that worked over a strategic installation in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury on February 28, was somewhere else. There is only one of them.
Then General Gregory Guillottold Congress the number that should have ended the conversation about whether we have this handled. "About a quarter of the ones that we detect, we're able to defeat." He offered it as good news, and by the standard of the previous year he was right: in 2025, he said, "almost every one that was detected was not defeated."
Welcome to The Iron Triangle, a dedicated column serving the procurement officers who are asked with buying the future, Investors funding the next generation of defense technology, and the policy wonks analyzing impact on the global order.
Hold that in your head. The federal government with every authority Congress can write, the entire electromagnetic spectrum at its disposal, and a defense budget larger than the next nine countries combined, stops one drone in four over its own bomber bases.
Now we are handing the same problem to a sheriff's department in Talladega, and we have written them a rule that is worse.
A Rule That Anticipates Everything Except the Answer
On July 6, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security published theinterim final rule implementing the SAFER SKIES Act, effective July 1, and for the first time extended real counter-drone authority to state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement, and, critically, to correctional agencies. This is overdue, it was built fast, and the people who wrote it deserve credit for standing up a certification and oversight architecture on a compressed timeline.
Then you get to the Authorized Technologies List, which is the part that decides what a certified agency may actually field. The Departments expect the initial list to contain three categories: radio-frequency detection with command-and-control signal interception, RF disruption (broadband and protocol-specific jamming), and RF protocol manipulation, meaning command injection and cyber takeover. All three are radio-frequency categories. There is no fourth.
This would be an unremarkable sequencing decision except that the rest of the rule plainly contemplates bringing an aircraft down by physical means. The statute authorizes certified agencies to use reasonable force to "disable, damage, or destroy" an unmanned aircraft. The rule requires air-traffic notification for mitigation that emits no radio frequency, and the preamble explains why in language that leaves nothing to interpretation: such an action can affect the airspace "for example by bringing an unmanned aircraft down or creating falling debris." The rule requires Mitigation Certification for personnel who physically intercept a drone in flight.
So the rule trains an agency to do it. Certifies the officer to do it. Writes the falling-debris notification procedure for when they do it. And then hands them a list with nothing on it they can do it with. Plainly spoken, the rule does not include kinetic interceptors, something that knocks a drone out of the sky.
That is what happens when a list gets populated by whatever already had the deepest federal deployment history, which is exactly what the Departments said they were doing. The RF categories had the paperwork. So the RF categories got the boxes. The list has nothing to do with what works. It is a fossil record of what has already been bought.
Three Categories, One Point of Failure
Here is why this is a safety problem and not a paperwork problem. The three listed categories are functionally distinct and they share a single dependency: every one of them requires the target aircraft to present an exploitable radio link. Where there is no link, interception has nothing to intercept, jamming has nothing to jam, and cyber takeover has no protocol to take over. They do not degrade independently. They fail together, at the same instant, against the same threats.
Three classes of aircraft now routinely present no such link. A drone flying a stored waypoint route with its control link severed emits nothing and listens to nothing; this is a checkbox on consumer airframes. A protocol-hardened or custom-built airframe falls outside the signature libraries that detection-and-takeover systems depend on. And then there is fiber optic, which is the one that should be keeping planners awake. They manage control and video via physical filament. There is no radio link at all. Fiber optic drones are immune to jamming as a matter of physics rather than engineering. Russia is turning out more than fifty thousand fiber-optic FPV drones a month at a single facility in Veliky Novgorod. The technique defeated RF countermeasures at Kharkiv. It defeated them over Victory Base Complex in Baghdad, where there was no visible intercept attempt at all.
None of this is exotic. It is three years old, it is cheap, and it is documented in open sources that any competent adversary reads on the same afternoon you do.
An agency limited to the three RF categories is superbly equipped against a careless hobbyist with a stock quadcopter and defenseless against anyone who has been paying attention. That is precisely the inverse of the risk profile the rule exists to address.
The Recent Events Are Not Ambiguous
On June 24, just twelve days before the rule was published, theJustice Department indicted twelve defendants in what it called the largest federal prosecution to date involving coordinated drone operations to smuggle contraband into prisons. Ten federal facilities across eight states. Thirty-eight documented drops using six aircraft, running from September 2023 through May 2026. Methamphetamine, K-2, Suboxone, cell phones, tobacco, and saw blades.
Two and a half years of flights. Thirty-eight of them are documented. That is not a hobbyist wandering into restricted airspace. That is a logistics operation with route planning, aircraft attrition, and a customer base. Organizations at that level of sophistication adapt to countermeasures. The adaptation most cheaply available to them is the one the initial Technologies List cannot answer.
Compare the coverage. Five days later a JetBlue crew reported striking a drone on approach to JFK, and it led the news for a week before a preliminary investigation found no physical evidence that it happened at all. The collision that may have been nothing got the cameras. The thirty-eight drops that certainly happened got a press release from the Middle District of Georgia.
The Part That Should Embarrass Us
Now for the contrast that makes this a column instead of a comment.
On January 28, Brigadier General Matt Ross, who directs Joint Inter-Agency Task Force 401, told reporters: "I see us using low-collateral kinetic interceptors at all installations in the homeland." The Deputy Secretary of Defense had directed JIATF-401 to ensure kinetic capability at every location. Two days later thetask force awarded $5.2 million for the Bumblebee V2, a kinetic interceptor, with deliveries beginning in March. Asked about squeamishness over kinetic engagement inside the United States, Ross said he "fundamentally disagrees."
Same airspace. Same threat. Same country, in the same calendar year. The Department of War calls low-collateral kinetic interception essential and is buying it for every installation in the homeland. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security published a list on which that category does not exist.
What Each Corner of the Triangle Should Take From This
For the Procurement Officer, understand what you are budgeting against. You can be accredited, certified, trained, and funded, and still have nothing to buy, because the box your requirement lives in has not been created. The rule as published does not tell you plainly that kinetic capability is unavailable to you. State and local agencies are writing fiscal-year plans and grant subaward requests against it right now, and some of them are going to buy capability they are not authorized to employ.
For the Investor, this is the diligence question you are not asking. You have been asking whether the technology works and whether there is a customer. Start asking a third question: what category does this go in, and does that category exist yet? A company can be technically excellent, combat-proven, and commercially validated, and still be unsellable because a list has no line for it. Listing risk is not a footnote in the regulatory section of the deck. In this sector it is the whole thesis, and it is currently unpriced.
For the Policy Wonk, notice what just happened to the locus of policy. Congress debated the SAFER SKIES Act in public. The interim final rule went through interagency review and took comment. But the Authorized Technologies List, the instrument that actually determines what a certified American police department may deploy against a drone over a school, is an administrative artifact updated through a coordination portal. No one voted on it. Most people affected by it do not know it exists.
I have spent years watching good capability lose to bad process, and I thought I had seen the full catalogue. I had not. The Valley of Death I have been writing about is a money problem: you have the technology, you cannot get the contract. This is something else. This is a company that has the technology, the customer, the certification, the training pipeline, and the federal deployment history, and cannot sell, because the taxonomy has no word for what it built. Call them the Unlisted. They are the Forgotten Bench's stranger cousin, and they lose more quietly, because there is no rejection letter. There is just a list that does not mention them.
The fix is small and it is already scheduled. The Departments said they would run a sixty-day sprint to revise the list after publication. Add a fourth category, low-collateral kinetic interception, defined narrowly enough to exclude firearms, unguided ballistic means, directed energy, and anything heavy enough to be its own hazard. Write objective listing criteria the way the RF categories already have them: bounded interceptor mass, bounded terminal energy, demonstrated fail-safe behavior on loss of lock, a modeled and test-validated debris footprint, a declared engagement envelope. Then say plainly, in one sentence, that until such a category exists, kinetic mitigation is unavailable so that nobody spends a grant on a capability they cannot lawfully employ.
The Risk
I am not going to pretend this one is free, because it is not, and the people who will be nervous about it are right to be. Radio-frequency mitigation that fails harmlessly drops a link. Kinetic mitigation that fails drops an object, and it drops it over a stadium concourse, a prison yard at count time, an interstate at rush hour. The rule's own falling-debris notification requirement exists because somebody thought that through, and a two-kilogram interceptor over a crowd is not a spreadsheet exercise. Widening this list carelessly buys us a very bad Tuesday.
There is a second risk, and I have written this column before from the other direction. A category written narrowly enough becomes a moat for whoever helped write it, which is how well-intended technical criteria turn into incumbency by another name. That is the ITAR story wearing a domestic uniform, and anyone advocating for a new category, including me, should be watched for it.
And a third: certification is not proficiency. A deputy with forty hours of classroom time and a kinetic interceptor is a genuinely different risk than an operator who has done it a thousand times. Recurrency has to be tied to the effector an agency actually fields, not to one undifferentiated certificate, because competence with a jammer transfers to a kinetic interceptor exactly not at all.
None of that argues for keeping the category empty. It argues for writing it carefully, on a clock, with real criteria, which is a harder job than leaving the box blank, and the reason the box is blank.
We have built a system in which the most consequential procurement decision in American counter-drone policy is not made by a program office, a contracting officer, or a member of Congress. It is made by whoever maintains a list. Comments on the rule close on September 4. After that, the question stops being what we should have listed and becomes what we have to explain. The honest version of that question is this: when a drone that does not answer a radio comes over the wire at a federal prison, and the certified, trained, funded officer standing under it has nothing on the list to use, whose signature is on that?
Disclosure: Atlas Special Projects prepared a public comment on the rule discussed below on behalf of a counter-UAS manufacturer. The argument here is that of the author, and it applies to a category of technology rather than to any one company's product.
Editor’s note- Russia's war in Ukraine has fundamentally changed the character of warfare, proving that autonomous and attritable drones are no longer supporting tools but have become a decisive instrument of combat. In this provocative essay, co-authors Xen & Matthew Creedican argue that the United States must abandon legacy assumptions and adopt an entirely new military doctrine, force structure, and industrial strategy built for the age of autonomous warfare. (Xen is a former US Special Operations veteran with experience fighting alongside Ukrainian forces. We have granted his request for anonymity).
This paper is written expressly for the policy and decision makers across the military and public and private sectors who are bound to translate national strategy into reality. We will withhold for another day the arguments for convincing those who have yet to concede that the rifleman’s day is over or that drone warfare in Ukraine generalizes. Instead, we are making a series of recommendations to those already on board with direction from the Department of War (DoW) that “we are pivoting the Pentagon and industrial base to awartime footing”, as manifested in a$50B+ modernization program to ensure that “every warfighter must have access to low-cost/attritable sUAS [small drones] to conduct missions.” To help leaders meet such a steep challenge, we will describe how the force should be structured, how doctrine should be written, and how the industrial base must be re-engineered to match present scaling by our adversaries.
What a Modern Drone Force Should Look Like, For Now
If we could snap our fingers now and summon an army well-trained and well-equipped according to the latest understanding of modern drone warfare, it might be composed of battalions fielding approximately fifty to a hundred mixed-role unmanned systems deployable simultaneously, with stocks of thousands more unmanned vehicles and spare parts (antennas, ground stations) ready to replace those attrited. The force tailoring would have to include both rotary and fixed-wing drones performing reconnaissance, mothership, electronic warfare, one-way attack (OWA), bomber, and multi-role tasks. Such a battalion should be able to organically find, fix, and finish targets at ranges up to300km.
Presently in Ukraine, formations tend to specialize by range. Tactical or “infantry” battalions deploy quadcopters controlled by direct radio link or fiber optic from positions 3-10km from the absolute front, flirting with the danger zone, with the better teams now fielding glide-kit quads reaching out to 50+km, doubling their effective range from last year. Ground drone units are increasingly critical as well, performing the vast majority of evacuation and logistics within the 9-15km+ “gray zone” where manned vehicles are not worth the risk to employ. Dedicated drone battalions overwatch these units from 10-20km from no man’s land, operating typically out to 80km but at times out to 300km thanks to proliferating autonomy and redundant communications (direct, meshing, repeating, satellite, LTE, etc.). This upper end for the “mid-range” or “operational” level of warfare has also at least doubled since last year. Finally, specialized deep strike teams are now conducting strikes out tobeyond 1500km against strategic targets, with high-volume, low-cost, independent, adaptable platforms quite different from expensive legacy US drones.
At every level of the above structure, it is understood that even the non-OWA platforms must be attritable, since they rarely accomplish more than several missions without being rendered inoperable. Particularly cheap systems are evendeliberately used as decoys. And of course, seeping down into these echelons is autonomy enabled by AI, and the beginnings ofswarming protocols. It must be understood that what the aircraft carrier once did to naval gunnery is what the drone is doing to the rifleman. The fundamental unit of combat power is now the small drone team, and it is an over-the-horizon asset.
Saving Combined Arms Maneuver
Drones employed properly in such formations could execute combined arms maneuver warfare rather than the attrition warfare we currently see. After reconnoitering the enemy and making contact, unmanned battalions could use air platforms in both expendable and regenerative loitering waves to degrade air defenses, electronic warfare systems, logistics, and command structures, after which successive waves could suppress and attrite ground forces in preparation for ground drones to take, hold, and shape ground. Only then would humans move forward to effectively deepen the range of their systems. All this implies an in-depth rewriting and reapplication to unmanned warfare of manuals and doctrine guides such as FM 3-0 Operations, FM 3-90 Tactics, and FM 3-96 Brigade Combat Team. Current revisions have relegated the drone to asupporting role at best. Another example: given that a legacy US Army Corps of tens of thousands of personnel has multiple days to make decisions across approximately the same operational striking depth as that of one of the aforementioned Ukrainian drone battalions of a few hundred personnel, clearly we must revise our echeloned depths of responsibility . The existing disparity has practical consequences, as Ukrainians not only handily defeat NATO forces in joint exercises, but they do it with comparatively tiny forces, striking larger formations and assets in areas thought to be “safe”.
As such, it should be clear to those familiar with the actual contestants in programs likeDrone Dominance that we are staging to mostly procure platforms that are too expensive for the requested operational ranges. Although the DoW has set a target of roughly half a million drones per year for procurement, it will actually need at least fifty million to meet the lofty goal of training and equipping a ~500,000-1,000,000 man force with attritable systems. If we look to the rest of the world, we will see that Ukraine and Russia this year are each likely to utilize aroundtwenty million drones, while China, as the manufacturer of most of the world’s drone components, will likely build the equivalent of a hundred million drones.
Predictive Doctrine for a Moving Target
But even this, unfortunately, is not the real crux of the issue with respect to the development of future requirements. Doctrine must not only be prescriptive of the present, but also of the near future. The fact is, we cannot just snap our fingers to summon a drone army. It will take years to build it out, and by then things will look even more “sci-fi”. That is, we are chasing a moving target three to ten years out, and so we had best engage in some imagination to meet that challenge.
We are conscious of how radical this is going to sound, but our goal with such provocation is indeed to shift the Overton window, so, we believe that the future will look like something out of Ender’s Game, and it’s going to happen well before those now entering the military reach retirement eligibility.
Man, Train, and Equip for the Sci-Fi Near Future
Individual drone controllers will become tactical commanders (so let’s call them “tacticians”) remotely running squadrons of individually autonomous drones,point-and-clicking their way through a 3D interactive, AI-mediated, sensor-fusion digital twin of the battlefield. The base layer is already here in the digital panopticon emerging from cloud-native Common Operating Picture (COP) software like Ukraine’sDelta merging with military AI suites. Palantir’s Maven already suggests courses of action at the command level, and there’s no reason this couldn’t be extended down to the lowest tactical levels, controllable by voice, touch, or text. In a few more years the tacticians themselves will be inside somethingNeuralink-shaped, performing at the speed of AI-enhanced thought and striking at the links in the chain that enable adversarial tacticians. Under those conditions the adaptation cycle, too, will move at a speed that cognitively unenhanced humans cannot keep up with, and intelligence becomes the runaway comparative advantage at every level. There is no telling where such cognitive selection pressure combined with the ability to remotely control drone swarms will end. Will individual soldiers control dozens of drones simultaneously – or thousands? How many drones should a “battalion” have?
Decentralization is a factor too. Everything we are seeing develop now is scaling in Ukraine down to the individual operator, as it must. The over-the-horizon warrior needs personal access tolivestreamed tactical radar to check if the skies are clear before he exposes himself by making movement. He needs edge compute not just onboard his drones, but for local offline AI to analyze the battlefield and make decisions even in a communications blackout. Already we see backpack portable drone interceptor systems for personal defense; I’m aware of contracts under consideration for such systems to miniaturize to automated shoulder-launch, like a personal version of the tank-mounted Trophy system. The current estimate is that a soldier has one to four seconds to defend himself against a visual drone contact vectoring on him, and soon that timeline will compress enough to exceed human reaction times.
Asking what exactly the mass of conventional soldiers will do under such a radical restructuring is much like asking whether or not Large Language Models (LLMs) are going to have the net effect of creating or destroying jobs in the civilian workforce. We may see the formation of a tiny military class, or perhaps warfare will become even more industrial in human scale. Certainly, humans will be pushed farther and farther back in the logistical chain that ultimately delivers kinetic effects upon an adversary. Currently, there is a need for people to physically emplace, operate, and recover antennas, ground stations, and drones. Once robots are more commonly executing these tasks (already, some aerial drones are launched viamulti-domain mothership drones), people will work on those robots, and so forth. Eventually, it’s hard to see what anyone will need to do physically, as robots will be building, repairing, improving, and employing each other. The only real foreseeable tasks left at the tactical echelon will be those of the tactician and the true engineer, who innovates and integrates locally. Whoever best automates tasks end-to-end will win the tempo fight. The transportation of weapons and sensors has to be contemplated as one mass-manufactured logistical animal.
Going further, the tactician need not position himself relative to any front at all, because he can fly remotely and because he would be sensible to reduce his threat profile from direct action threats to intelligence-driven threats only. That is, he should position himself to strike with impunity. Already in Ukraine, Sting pilots have flown their interceptors remotely500km away from where they were launched. Midrange teams outside the gray zone already drive to position in unmarked civilian vehicles, wear their uniforms only for the minimal time needed to deploy their systems, and then fade back into the population. And the naval drones striking the Russian fleet are not generally controlled from the sea, but ultimatelyfrom bases on land. If trends hold, the smallest independent tactical elements may be able to cheaply strike anywhere on Earth within a decade.
Branching Futures: eVTOLs, Smart Dust, and Beyond
But this is merely one vision of the future. There are branching pathways, perhaps some of which may coexist. Weaponized human-optional eVTOLs like the Chinese prototypeZR-300 could become a new air cavalry paradigm unto themselves if employed en masse in shock fashion, sweeping aside whole nations in a day the way Central Asian hordes did in the Medieval period, or the way Islamist insurgents swept across the Sahel inToyotas. Microscopic drone “clouds” also known as smart dust could penetrate any conventional barrier, performing reconnaissance or even coalescing explosively or penetrating air ducts and lungs. Does this seem one step too far, straining credulity? Remember that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” from the perspective of the old guard, and that all these technologies are already real, just not fully scaled and integrated. In fact, micro drones were feasible decades ago, technically if not economically – timing is everything. We already have a leading indicator in the German army’s very real purchase of cyborg insect swarms fromSwarm Biotactics. Against such dizzying possibilities, we will advocate further on below for a rapidly adapting structure that ingrains real-world feedback and extrapolates from it.
Economies of Scale for Drone Production
First, let’s deal with how we produce enough useful drones to simply match our adversaries. The necessary industrial base to deliver manufacturing on the required scale simply does not exist anywhere in the West currently, whereas China has quietly captured the drone market and the sub-component supply chains over decades and is integrating such technology down to their lowest tactical echelons at a hundred times our volume. Much has already been written about the need to innovate and iterate on a scale of weeks rather than decades, and while true such a need potentially comes with the steep requirement of continuous retooling of factories and endless R&D. Ironically, funding this effort at the scale needed will require a vision across a much longer (generational) timeline, in opposition to the quarterly results that drive Western business strategy. Currently, the US buys primarily the end-product rather than engendering the component markets directly. From a cost-savings standpoint, we would do well to preemptively build adaptable systems, and also to stop trying to update legacy programs (we will never need a new sniper rifle). The DoW budget has to fund the domestic mass production of production itself, with an eye towards dual-use sub-components and machine tools, since commercial R&D and production can fund itself to an extent. Vehicles, phones, and drones sold into civilian markets pay for their own scaled production, and volume buys down cost. As it stands now with our current component outsourcing, we are paying our enemies to equip us, tying the rope with which they intend to hang us.
Pillars of a Sovereign Drone Industry
The pillars of industry to be funded include locomotion, actuation, energy, storage, compute, sensing, and communications. The component-level specifics, meaning motor sizes, magnet chemistries, cell formats, and the rest, belong in a technical paper. What’s important here is that the government has to guarantee the market for base components as much as scale requirements dictate and raw materials allow, while simultaneously finding the alternatives that bypass adversarial chains entirely.
Shallow or single-sourced chains halt on the first disruption, so volume has to be distributed across multiple domestic entities in order to create redundant paths. That means accounting for the physical bottleneck of factory siting, the legal bottleneck of restrictive radio frequency and flight-test regimes, and the social bottleneck of technical workforce recruitment, which in practice means a nationwide push for engineers with the education pipelines to match. We should fixate less on the static stockpile and more on the velocity at which the economy can replace a lost or outdated asset. Eventually, this may look like self-assembling factories, but for now we should see a dramatic increase in industrial jobs, not a reduction.
Guaranteed Requirements and Manufacturer Caps
The Departments of War and Commerce must jointly establish requirements and guarantee purchase of components at massive volumes, over multi-year timescales, according to stringent standards for minimum viable products meeting or exceeding foreign equivalents, with caps set on what portion of the total any one manufacturer can source. Subcontracting and manufacturer caps will encourage competition inside our own secure ecosystem rather than across national borders, where we are frequently undercut by adversaries. As needed, the government can resell unused inventory back to industry at or below the cost of subsidized foreign imports, letting American companies build with cheap secure inputs.
We have a realistic precedent for all this, as described in the book Freedom’s Forge: In anticipation of US entry into WW2, President Roosevelt brought together former of heads of industry in order to align military requirements, government funding, and civilian production capacity so that goals could be revised upward continuously, and the resulting volume forced a dynamic of subcontracting to keep up with demand. American industry responded, not only producing hundreds of thousands of complex war machines, but also rapidly retrofitting them as needed based on frontline feedback, on much the same timescales that we today see in Ukraine.
Innovation on the Machine Timescale
In the near future, however, we will have to go even further, with innovation necessarily occurring on the machine timescale. The same digital twin in which soldiers will virtually train and fight will also let us simulate hardware, factories, and logistics before steel is ever cut. The panopticon in which the end product’s edge sensors feed data into will be the same in which an arbitrary number of tests under variable conditions may be run before the more refined next generation of product is built. Supply chains from base-component assembly through fuel and battery pathways can be estimated and stressed the same way. Data streams from around the globe and from local instrumentation can all compartmentalize or cohere as needed for efficiency or breadth of understanding, all of it parseable by ever-increasing machine intelligence, at worst bounded in growth only by Moore’s Law. As an aside regarding encouraging a martial culture amongst the youth who will one day fill the tactician ranks, our military should release realtime strategy wargames involving drone swarming, initially as standalone games but eventually living inside the kind of digital twin explained above. And as earlier mentioned, all of this will eventually be experienced in breathtaking detail in virtual reality and via brain-machine interface. This is not so distasteful a task on a wartime footing, especially considering even in peacetime the military has releasedfirst-person shooter games and simulations.
Massive integrated training areas, in which units, contractors, and manufacturers co-locate to live-fire and iterate together, belong on the near-term build list. The mandate inside such an area should be inverted from current practice, so that the burden shifts from justifying permission for a given action to justifying why any given action cannot happen. The FAA, the FCC, and the rest of the regulatory apparatus should be effectively kicked out of the perimeter, and legislation should extend a good-faith liability shield covering crashes and honest mistakes. Dedicated integration units, which can be thought of asTransition in Contact supercharged, should be created. The core skill of these new units would not be warfighting but rather adapting to and assembling whatever technology is available. Every unit, not just dedicated ones, should additionally have at least some innovation budget and personnel, so that they are not merely customers but also integrators. Specifically, this means the military needs to be mass recruiting engineers to fill out dedicated innovation units and also sprinkle across the wider force. And lastly, the soldiers who will become the drone tacticians must be allowed to train for that role full-time, studying meteorology, radio theory, and other topics and skills currently regarded as arcane among warfighters.
A Permanent Feedback Loop from the Front
None of the above works without a permanent structured feedback loop that connects requirements to what is actually happening in a live conflict. Local units cannot generate requirements for now let alone five years out if there is no frontline feedback, no rotating instructor cycle, and no living link to platforms that do not yet exist in Western inventories. A peacetime force generating peacetime requirements will buy peacetime equipment no matter how decentralized the process is. Instead, we need a much greater scale of personnel who are aggressively forward deployed to conflict zones, visiting tactical operations centers and doing ridealongs on relatively low-risk mid- and deep-strike operations. Our partners will gladly place them there if they provide as much as they take. Directly in this role we can put our incredible all-volunteer special operators, who want nothing more than to get close to the fire. Adjacent to it, in lower intensity areas, we can forward deploy conventional troops as well to learn from partners, including by attending their own schoolhouses.
What we are suggesting here is deploying thousands of troops, not merely small cells of elite military and intelligence agency operators whose reporting does not reach the wider military. Much like the technical innovation measures described in the previous paragraph, these warriors should be distributed both into new dedicated units for the express purpose of doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures innovation, as well as across the wider force, to supercharge change and acquire what Clausewitz called a “fingertip feel” for the present state of war. If there is really no political appetite for this, then the only other option is to accomplish the same via other methods, such as by inviting large numbers of military instructors from partner nations currently involved in active conflict or by rotating civilian contractors more discreetly through conflict areas, as suggested by former Green BeretBryan Pickens.
Piping Frontline Signal Directly to Doctrine Writers
Regardless of how it is done, the core part of whatever structure is created should report directly to the senior military leadership responsible for the development of force-wide doctrine and requirements, so that they cannot ignore reality and hide in dead paradigms. Various new offices are being created, such asDRPM-UxS, and our hope is that with direct signal they can utilize sweeping - even disruptive - authorities to continually remake the military; for, as Napoleon said, “unhappy the general who comes on the field of battle with a system”. Given the enemy’s endless adaptation, the best meta-doctrine is to accept no particular doctrine as certain or permanent, and even to assume that it is likely wrong if it has not been overhauled lately. Official doctrine documents would be better written and accessed as living Google docs rather than year-dated static PDFs.
This applies down to the nitty-gritty of institutional knowledge as well. The train-the-trainer model informed by forward-deployed reporting must fuel change in our own programs of instruction and battle drills, so that we actually know how to employ the unmanned weapon systems we are scaling, a capability which further feeds into local units understanding the requirements for the next round of equipment purchases.
A sharedrive with compartmentalized access is not enough; we need our whole force separated at most by just one degree from someone who has seen modern war up close. And if the military is that close to the combat demand signal, then by extension the manufacturers who visit the units they are equipping will be that much closer.
The Transition Engine and Treating Ukraine as a Peer
Joseph Gagnard of Atlas Special Projects calls the sum total of all these joint efforts the “transition engine”, meaning operators, builders, contracting specialists, and investors institutionalized together, because no single one of them fields capability alone. That transition engine has to be paired with a treatment of Ukraine that most of the current western defense industry still resists. Treat the Ukrainians peer to peer, at least as well as Taiwan or South Korea, and better than either, because they are in an existential fight we cannot afford for them to lose. I suggest bringing thousands of Ukrainian engineers, managers, and operators into the United States to help build the drone industry. Regarding AI, America holds the architecture, the compute capacity, the models, and the global reach. But Ukraine holds the live-fire scaffolding for how that data actually gets generated, labeled, fused, and fed back into the iteration cycle; they have the premier Common Operating Picture software,Delta, to facilitate collection; and they are best positioned to evaluate the battlefield effectiveness of each successive generation of combat AI.
Furthermore, Ukraine is waging a global hybrid war on the West’s behalf, which we hardly engage in except via the most deniable means. China, Russia, and their proxies and allies ruthlessly exploit neutral ground with a vast array of tools, strangling us of resources, allies, and positioning. As political will allows, we suggest unleashing our special operators and intelligence officers in nearly-overt ways, in partnership with Ukrainians, who willingly perform more risky action and have a history of cooperation with our intel services, to operate across the globe responding in kind to theAxis arrayed against us. Drones, of course, are the perfect semi-deniable weapon for this. And the signal we receive back by more heavily involving our forces in low-intensity conflicts will feed back into the plan regarding getting a “fingertip feel” back for war.
The Vulnerable Homefront
The homefront, meanwhile, is ripe for a crippling preemptive strike against us. Our infrastructure is vulnerable, and drones as stated are a perfect scalable weapon that can be employed by deniable proxies. A strike could produce economically disastrous effects, and in response to such an attack of ostensibly deniable origin and limited death toll we would certainly not seek to launch, say, a nuclear retaliatory strike. Containerized long-range drones could be lurking on civilian ships off our coast right now. DHS testified to the Senate that in 2025 there were an average of 10,000 foreign drone flights per month near the southern border. Particularly at risk to such a looming threat is our AI infrastructure. Whatever one’s thoughts on the supposed “AI bubble” (the dot-com bubble didn’t stop the triumphant march of internet adoption, did it?), it is undeniable that both the previous and current administrations have regarded the AI race as existential, and our enemies clearly feel the same way.
We saw from arecent strike by Iran on data centers in the UAE providing Amazon Web Services that such centers are vulnerable, going down for several months at a minimum due to spreading fires and long lead time for repair parts. A few hundred drones striking data centers or upstream links in the chain could easily set us back in the AI race which could provide our adversary an opportunity to surge permanently ahead, a situation which, again, our bipartisan leadership regards as an existential threat.
A Decentralized, Always-On CONUS Defense
The right posture for CONUS defense is one that is always on and autonomous-capable, able to intercept without waiting for the chain of command. In addition, such efforts must take the form of a whole-nation decentralized effort. In Ukraine, a nationwide cheap network of mobile phones acoustically tracks hostile long-range drones swarming their country, and recent legislation approved the use of electronic warfare and interceptor drones by businesses to protect their own assets. New manufacturing and power facilities tend to be built in a distributed, resilient, redundant manner, with cheap hardening available for obvious targets (like anti-drone “cages”). Our recommendation, like elsewhere, is to empower everything local. We would even go so far as to suggest that the Second Amendment needs to extend to counter-drone equipment, and any U.S. person or institution should be able to engage perceived threats up to certain altitudes above their own land.
AI as Sovereign Terrain
We can extend the Second Amendment and drones argument to the First Amendment and AI; that is, to digital and not just physical terrain. Across the information domain, China steals from us and undercuts us, releasing open LLMs to erase Western software margins. Intellectual property in this context is a burden more than a benefit by now, perhaps functioning somewhat to promote internal competition but leaving us wide open for external exploitation. The best way to stay ahead of our enemy in the face of their undermining of our brittle centralized systems is to fight fire with fire. We need policy and funding to shy away from the current big LLM players and instead encourage open models, local compute, and data sovereignty, which offer numerous long-term advantages across the board that mirror the kind of resiliency and initiative-encouraging effects we will get by distributing compute and AI models down to the lowest levels of our military.
Encryption code, for example, was previously ruled to fall under free speech protections. There is an argument against allowing centralizing and censorship of digital spaces as well, regarding them as a kind of common space since there is a barrier to entry in networking at the level of Internet Service Provider infrastructure. We need a diverse market of competing open AI models, local compute, social networks, etc. A centralized internet and centralized AI have severe risks within the domains of psychological and information warfare, which play out across the public digital arena, but to go further in that discussion we would have to depart from the scope of the kinetic warfare focus of this article. Suffice to say, the most dystopian and existentially risky outcomes are plausible if centralized AI should win, whether by our own hand or the hand of the enemy, who will surely centralize control over their models as soon as they gain an advantage.
Deterrence via Force Projection
Another point worth addressing when discussing CONUS defense is the idea that“the bomber always gets through”, which is probably true regarding drone swarms. However, regarding the homefront, Ukraine has shown first that the effects of long-range drone attacks can at least be mitigated significantly, and that it is economically optimal to do so. Furthermore, the striking arm we are also building alongside the defenses will serve as a deterrent, since nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is insufficient for the aforementioned reasons. If we can threaten to do unto our enemies as they wish to do unto us, and indeed if we actually regularly exercise this capacity in the global low-intensity ongoing war, then we will make them think twice before hitting us.
The Core Principle: Endless Distributed Adaptation Capacity
The single principle of this piece is this- Stop buying end products and start buying the ability to produce them, at scale, sovereignly, and forever – doctrine here being one of those end products. The victor that emerges from the next several years will have built the meaningfully decentralized version of what we have described here, meaning distributed compute, sensors, swarms, command, cognition, industry, and authority, with the standards and alliances to match. The rallying cry, in the end, is the architecture. In the last great war, we firebombed cities, preemptively invaded neutral countries, and of course ultimately resorted to nuclear weapons. The political license for a national revitalization as a form of deterrence seems, by comparison, an easy pill to swallow.
Note from author (Xen)- For those who wish to understand not merely the how but the why, or who have comments, or who desire greater breadth or depth of understanding: Over the coming weeks I will be sharing additional information to my personalSubstack andwebsite. As for my co-author, Matthew A. Creedican, you can find him onLinkedIn.
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Technically all that you need in order to make a drone fly is a single motor and single propeller, but realistically it becomes basically impossible to fly it at that point. In the case of helicopters you therefore need a second rotor somewhere to provide counterbalance to the first and to be able to steer.
