Hegseth’s Shutting Down Drones in the Era of Drone War

By Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson (Retired)

There is a lot of justifiable anxiety these days about robots in the private sector, and the worry I hear most often is that they will cost people their jobs. Among those of us who have fought wars, the calculation runs the other way. If there is a way to send a machine to do a job that would otherwise kill a 19-year-old, you send the machine.

Which is why I am shaking my head at the Army’s decision to phase out the one unit we had that was learning how to do that.

The Unmanned Assault Battalion, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, was stood up last year to absorb what Ukraine has been teaching the rest of the world about drone warfare. It will finish an exercise in September, brief what it learned, and then go back to being an ordinary airborne infantry battalion. Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the acting Army chief of staff, calls this “getting back to basics.”

I spent 15 months in Iraq as Gen. David Petraeus’s senior logistician, responsible for delivering about two million gallons of fuel a day. More than a thousand Americans were killed moving fuel over those supply lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every convoy I did not have to run was possibly a family that didn’t get a dreaded knock on the door later.

That is the case for unmanned systems, and my old boss Gen. Petraeus put it this way back in April: “What we should do is scrap the armored battalions and replace them with a drone battalion.”

Just consider what the past two years have already taught us about the future of warfare:

The Royal United Services Institute found drones accounting for 60 to 70 percent of all Russian equipment destroyed or damaged in Ukraine, at roughly $500 a drone. That’s about one percent the cost of a single guided artillery round.

Iran has fired roughly 4,400 one-way attack drones at American and allied positions since February. Its counterattacks have killed 18 Americans and wounded 687 as of early August.

In our attempt to stop them, we fired more than 1,700 Patriot interceptors at $3.4 million apiece at drones that cost Iran about $35,000. CSIS estimates we burned through two-thirds of our entire Patriot inventory in under six months. A replacement missile takes three to four years to build.

Now hold on to your hats for this one. The Council on Foreign Relations puts the entire U.S. military drone inventory this year at about 16,000. Ukraine plans to build seven million.

Seven Million.

Now, when it comes to whether to send drones or men, Ukraine had this same fight, and it nearly cost President Zelenskyy his government. In July, he fired Mykhailo Fedorov, the defense minister who built the drone program, and sided with Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Soviet-trained commander who wanted to keep fighting with mass and artillery. Seventy-two percent of Ukrainians opposed the firing. Fedorov’s public trust rating jumped 30 points in two days. There were vocal protests from a country that understood the efficacy of drones, and within a week Zelenskyy reversed himself and fired Syrskyi instead.

We are going the other way. In fact, we’re heading backward.

The battalion’s two forward-thinking champions are gone. Gen. Randy George, then the Army chief of staff, and Gen. Christopher Donahue, then commanding Army forces in Europe and Africa, were fired or pushed into early retirement by Hegseth, clearing the path for Gen. LaNeve, and his “get back to basics” goal.

What was Gen. George’s offense? Reporting says he had objected to the secretary striking two Black officers and two women from an Army promotion list. You see, Hegseth has decided that a strong and diverse force is too “woke,” and that while we turn back the clock in how we fight wars, we should turn back the clock on who wears stars on their shoulders.

Not only that, but we have a president on a bizarre mission to turn back the clock on our ships.

On August 13, the President ordered the Navy to tear the electromagnetic catapult out of the carrier Doris Miller and put 1950s steam back in, a reversal the Navy fought for years and one that will cost billions. Apparently, this might have something to do with him wanting all of our ships to look like they did in World War II.

Money is finite. At the roughly $5,000 apiece the Pentagon pays for its own drones, one of those billions buys 200,000 of them, or about two-thirds of everything the department says it wants built by 2027. We are spending it instead to rip out the launch system that was designed to put light unmanned aircraft in the air off a deck.

It makes no sense. None of this makes any kind of sense. The only way it makes sense is if we want our military to become woefully outdated, ill-prepared, and purged of its best minds.

On the drones, Congress should do three things, and do them before the exercise ends next month:

• First, demand the written analysis behind killing the Unmanned Assault Battalion, if one was ever done.

• Second, require the Army to publish what that battalion learned, so the knowledge outlives the unit.

• Third, confirm no Army chief of staff who cannot explain, under oath, their concrete plan to fight the modern kind of drone war that is already underway.

And on the larger issue, Congress ought to find out what is driving this apparent fixation on turning back the clock to the military of old.

Our past generations of troops were heroic throughout multiple wars. But the world has changed, and war has changed, since then. If we’re going to call upon this military to ever do the same, they deserve a modern military, not the one that their parents and grandparents served in.