The U.S. military needs more drones. That sentence is not in dispute. What remains unresolved — and what the Pentagon is now spending serious money to address — is whether America can build them quickly, cheaply, and on its own soil, without handing Beijing a structural advantage in the process.
Travis Metz, Deputy Director of the Defense Innovation Unit, sat down with Aaron MacLean on the School of War podcast to discuss exactly that. The conversation covered three interlocking problems: the lessons the U.S. military should draw from Ukraine's drone war, the challenge of breaking American dependence on Chinese-made components, and the Pentagon's new billion-dollar effort to upgrade its aging drone capabilities.
The Ukraine angle is not decorative. That conflict has functioned as the most consequential live laboratory for drone warfare in modern history, and the record is public: small, cheap, commercially available drones have altered the battlefield calculus in ways that expensive legacy platforms never anticipated. The side that can manufacture, field, and replace drones faster than the enemy can destroy them holds a decisive edge. That is the lesson. The question is whether the U.S. defense establishment — built around long procurement cycles and large, costly systems — can absorb it in time.
The Chinese-parts problem is where the supply chain meets national security. A significant share of the commercial drone components available on the global market originate in China. For a military that may one day find itself in direct competition with Beijing, that dependence is not a rounding error. It is a structural vulnerability. Metz's role at the Defense Innovation Unit places him at the intersection of that problem and its potential solution: identifying and scaling American alternatives before the dependency becomes a liability that cannot be unwound.
The billion-dollar figure attached to the Pentagon's drone upgrade effort signals that this is no longer a think-tank conversation. Taxpayer money is moving. The question worth asking — the one that follows every large government program — is whether the institutional incentives are aligned to produce results, or whether the money will be absorbed by the same procurement bureaucracy that created the problem in the first place. Defense Innovation Unit was designed, in part, to be an answer to that question: a faster, more commercially oriented arm of the Pentagon that can work with the private sector on timelines that actually match the threat.
Say it plainly: the United States is behind where it needs to be on drone production, and the gap between American manufacturing capacity and the scale of the challenge is not small. Ukraine demonstrated what a motivated, resource-constrained actor can accomplish when it treats drone production as an industrial priority. The U.S. has the capital, the engineering talent, and — if the Defense Innovation Unit's mandate is taken seriously — the institutional mechanism to close that gap.
What it has lacked, until recently, is urgency. The record suggests that urgency is now arriving. Whether it arrives fast enough, and whether it produces drones rather than reports, is the only question that matters.
