OPINION:
The Pentagon plans to field hundreds of thousands of attack drones starting this year.
The Drone Dominance Program is spending $1.1 billion over 18 months to procure more than 340,000 one-way attack systems by January 2028, and the industrial base is responding.
The question nobody is answering: Who flies them?
A U.S. soldier is never issued a new weapon system without first being trained on how to employ it. Yet that is exactly what is happening as unmanned systems flow to the force in growing numbers.
First-person-view drones, difficult to jam and capable of striking targets more than 12 miles away, are a battlefield reality our armed forces must counter and employ. Allies such as Israel are already confronting this threat, as Hezbollah deploys FPV drones to devastating effect in southern Lebanon.
It is a matter of when, not if, American forces will face the same fight. The demand for operators to fly both offensive and counter-unmanned-aerial-systems platforms is accelerating faster than the training pipeline can absorb.
Take Ukraine, which built its operator base from scratch. The country’s 160 drone manufacturers aim to produce 8 million FPVs this year, supported by nearly 90,000 dedicated unmanned systems operators. Russia is increasing its force this year to 165,000 operators.
In comparison, the U.S. Marine Corps has certified 32 attack drone operators, five instructors and 18 payload specialists through early competitions. It is a great start, and we applaud the Corps and other services for standing up these pipelines. The ambition is to certify hundreds more. The requirement is for tens of thousands. The math is unforgiving.
The Marine Corps launched its FPV training framework in December, standing up six courses and eight certifications, aiming to equip every infantry, reconnaissance and littoral combat team by May. The U.S. Army is pursuing its own platoon-based aerial system program.
These are the right moves, but FPV piloting is a perishable skill that demands constant repetition, and pipeline capacity is finite. Every experienced noncommissioned officer who pulls into a drone instructor billet is one fewer available to the tactical units that will actually employ these systems.
Autonomy will eventually reduce the operator burden, but there is a tension the Pentagon cannot ignore: Every layer of autonomous capability added to a drone raises its unit cost. Push autonomy far enough, and you no longer have an attritable system. You have an expensive asset that commanders are reluctant to expend.
The entire strategic logic of attritable mass depends on the ability to lose drones without hesitation. That logic collapses the moment the price climbs.
The trade-off, then, is to invest in the operator rather than just the platform. A skilled pilot flying a simple, expendable drone will outperform a poorly trained operator behind a smart system. The former adapts, improvises and exploits fleeting opportunities; the latter waits for software to catch up.
Smart pilots and dumb drones will win every time against the opposite combination. Training, not hardware sophistication, is the high-return investment here.
The near-term solution is massively expanding drone training with help from the private sector. At Vector, we deliver what we call “modern warfare as a service,” pairing hardware with trained operators and doctrine. Our operators, many of them special operations veterans, bring real battlefield experience and thousands of hours of stick time.
They train alongside the units they support, iterating weekly.
When autonomy arrives at scale, the contractors who spent years flying these systems will be the subject matter experts the military needs to write doctrine and train the force on the transition. That institutional knowledge does not expire. It compounds.
Both Ukraine and Russia achieved scale by integrating these concepts. Ukraine’s civilian-military drone ecosystem now accounts for roughly 80% of Russian battlefield losses. The U.S. need not copy either model wholesale, but the demand signal for drone operators will exceed the capacity of uniformed personnel for years.
Manufacturers can produce the hardware. Procurement alone cannot solve the human capital problem.
I left the military after 18 years to found Vector because my co-founders and I saw how quickly the battlefield was evolving and how acutely our training was failing to keep pace.
Drone dominance will not be won by manufacturing drones alone. It will be won by building operators at scale.
Technology matters. The people behind it matter more. The Defense Department is beginning to invest in the industrial base. It must also invest in its soldiers.
• Andy Yakulis is a former Army special operations officer and CEO and co-founder of Vector, a mission-driven modern warfare-as-a-service company based in Salt Lake City.
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