Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
The Army counted half the drones at Saber Junction as consumables
Brig. Gen. Terry Tillis said 1,000 of the roughly 2,000 drones at the Germany exercise were consumable. The Pentagon's Drone Dominance program is spending $1 billion on at least 200,000 drones through 2027.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Brig. Gen. Terry Tillis, head of the 7th Army Training Command, said 1,000 of the roughly 2,000 drones used at the exercise were consumable and that soldiers employed them like a munition.
- Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army's director of drone dominance, said another 30,000 drones are being received, enough to push them down to every squad.
- A brigade from the 101st Airborne Division assembled roughly 150 of the 228 attack drones it used in an exercise earlier this year, each taking a soldier a couple of hours to build.
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Why it matters
- constraint Expendability depends on stock on hand, so monthly resupply throughput to a squad is what limits this capability.
- cost Unit-level assembly moves part of the bill from a contract to a training calendar; roughly 300 hours of soldier time went into one brigade's drones, and the units own that time.
- decision Once drones are budgeted as consumables, the annual choice a planner signs off is a consumption rate per company, priced near $3 million a month at program-average cost.
- contradiction Norrie's count of about 1,900 and Tillis's of roughly 2,000 do not match, so the one-in-two consumable share is an estimate, and the number destroyed has not been reported.
A billion dollars for at least 200,000 drones works out to no more than $5,000 a unit on average [8][1]. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth set the category before anyone set a price. Small UAS resemble munitions more than high-end airplanes, he wrote in a memo last year directing an overhaul of how the Pentagon buys small uncrewed systems, and they should be cheap, rapidly replaceable, and categorized as consumable [7][9]. The drones flown in Germany go unpriced in Business Insider's account, so $5,000 is an average across the whole program.
Col. Ryan Bell, commander of the 3rd Mobile Brigade, put the threshold in daily terms when he spoke about one-way attack drones. "If a company has only one or two drones, or a platoon has a single drone, it's a niche capability," Bell said. "But a company that is provided 20 drones a day has an entirely new form of combat power" [13]. Twenty a day is 600 a month for one company [2]. Priced at the program average, that is about $3 million of drones a month for a single company [5].
Some of that bill is already being paid in soldier hours. A brigade from the 101st Airborne Division assembled roughly 150 of the 228 attack drones it used in an exercise earlier this year, about two-thirds of them, with each system taking a soldier a couple of hours to build [12][3]. At two hours apiece, that is around 300 hours of soldier time inside one exercise [4]. Soldiers have also been 3D printing parts so they can build systems when they need them or customize them for a mission [11].
A training rotation is not a consumption rate. Nothing in the reporting says how many of the 1,000 consumable drones at Saber Junction were actually lost, or how quickly they were replaced. The two officers' counts differ slightly: Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie put the exercise at approximately 1,900 autonomous systems, while Tillis described roughly 2,000, of which "1,000 were consumable" and soldiers were using them "like a munition" [2][3]. Business Insider reports that Ukraine has shown drones do not always replace more exquisite strike capabilities, though they give soldiers a low-cost and effective way to hit targets [15].
The classification decision, though, has already been made above the exercise, and it is the one that changes budgeting behaviour. Expendability in the Army's approach depends on holding enough systems that soldiers can use and lose them without coming up empty [1][16]. That makes the governing number a replenishment rate per squad per month.
The scenarios at Saber Junction were built partly on the war in Ukraine and run against electronic warfare and counter-drone systems [14]. "Those numbers continue to increase every rotation, and we will continue to increase them in future rotations," Norrie told reporters at a roundtable on Thursday, according to a transcript received by Business Insider [5]. Col. Gregory Merkl, the Army's director of drone dominance, said the Army is in the process of receiving another 30,000 drones, enough to get them down to every squad level [10].
What to watch
- Whether the Army publishes how many of the 1,000 consumable drones at Saber Junction were actually lost, and to what.
- Whether the 30,000 drones Merkl said are arriving reach squad level, and at what unit price.
- Whether any unit reports a consumption rate sustained over weeks, beyond a single rotation's count.