USA: The army plans to purchase at least 1 million drones

The US Army will purchase at least 1 million drones over the next 2-3 years, said US Minister of Land Forces Daniel Driscoll in an interview for Reuters on Friday. Currently, the US Army is acquiring approximately 50,000. unmanned aerial vehicles per year.

As Driscoll stated, plans to radically increase drone purchases are the result of lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, where cheap drones are used more as ammunition than as technically advanced equipment.

– We expect to purchase at least 1 million drones over the next two to three years, said a Pentagon official. And we expect that in a year or two, we will know that in the event of a conflict, we will be able to put in place a sufficiently robust and extensive supply chain that we will be able to produce any number of drones that we need, he added.

According to Driscoll, Ukraine and Russia produce about 4 million drones a year, and China probably produces more than twice that number. For the United States, this number is only about 50,000.

The Ministry of Defense announced similar initiatives earlier, during the administration of Joe Biden. The Replicator program was intended to produce large numbers of small drones that would be used as swarms of machines. The first contracts in this matter were signed last year, but according to media reports, it encountered problems due to the costs and the process of acquiring drones.

Driscoll said that instead of working with larger defense companies, the US Army wants to work with companies producing droneswhich could also find commercial application.

“We want to partner with other drone manufacturers who use them for Amazon deliveries and other diverse applications,” he said.

From Washington Oskar Górzyński (PAP)

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