[mopsi]

Entire categories of drones are missing from the US arsenal, such as the ultra-cheap wire-guided ones that allow Ukrainians to fly 20 km into the enemy's rear, enter buildings, explore them from the inside, and leave behind presents or detonate immediately if they find any targets. Such drones can be seen at the start of this video, and at the very end too, when they are sneaking up to artillery and puncturing gun barrels: https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1893632328108220538

The US leads in larger drones, like the Global Hawk, which is the size of a regional airliner, can stay airborne for more than a day, and cover tens of thousands of kilometers in that time. The smaller and cheaper ones are just expensive toys, far behind what's seen in Ukraine in terms of actual usefulness. A cheap Chinese agricultural sprayer drone with equally cheap 3D-printed drum of infantry grenades or an anti-tank mine strapped to it outperforms most "military grade" commercial offerings like Switchblade that cost ten times as much and are good for only a single use, unlike the sprayer, which returns home after dropping its payload.

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The US doesn’t try to build cheap One-Way Attack drones like Ukraine because the US has the most advanced air force in the world and utilizes that for surveillance and combat. They have advanced communications and battlefield coordination tools so that a small unit commander doesn’t need to carry/use drones. They can get surveillance from those Global Hawks and call in strikes from Reapers. The drones allow Ukraine to conduct asymmetric warfare against a larger force with more resources. The US is the larger force, and so those types of drones are a niche product, not a primary weapon.

[jandrewrogers]

The US has a different drone tech tree than Ukraine. Ukraine is adapting to the limitations of the cheap drones available to them. There is value in this as operational knowledge but it is a mistake to assume that the US is bound by similar constraints. They do things differently because they have other options. The US has plenty of experience designing wire-guided systems; they largely abandoned them for a reason.

There is much to learn about drone warfare from Ukraine but I would not expect a conflict with advanced technical capabilities to look similar.