The U.S. Air Force has lost nearly a third of the available fleet of its massive MQ-9A Reaper surveillance and attack drones in Middle East conflicts since the start of the Trump administration, including more than two dozen in the Iran war.

Sources tell Threat Status the Pentagon has no current replacement for the drone. General Atomics, which originally manufactured the reaper in the post-9/11 era, shuttered production in 2025 after Air Force orders dwindled. Now, after nearly $1 billion in lost MQ-9As, the company is offering its MQ-9B SkyGuardian instead.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have expressed concern there may not be enough funding to supply the platform, and political battles, funding strategy fights and costs from the Iran war threaten the proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget from the White House.

The venture capital industry is pumping record levels of private cash into American defense technology companies — considered a controversial investment in the past — in a way that national security insiders say is transforming the U.S. military industrial landscape.

Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI, Saronic and a slew of others have raised more than $14.6 billion in private investment this year, according to Crunchbase, an AI-powered dashboard and search engine that tracks private and public companies.

The shift has dramatically accelerated since the start of the Trump administration, fueled by a Pentagon and government publicly calling for more venture capital and investment in new technologies.

President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act this week, saying it is needed to to bring defense companies together on specific goals, such as the rapid production of missiles depleted by the Iran and Ukraine wars, at a speed that might otherwise violate federal antitrust provisions.

In a June 11 memo to Mr. Hegseth, the president bluntly gave the defense secretary “the authority” to direct “voluntary agreements and plans of action to help provide for the national defense.” The development, which widens Mr. Hegseth’s power over military spending, is necessary because current security conditions around the world “may pose a direct threat to the national defense or its preparedness programs,” the memo states.

The memo marks the latest move in the administration’s aggressive use of federal authority to pursue defense industry goals. What’s unclear is how “voluntary” agreements among U.S. defense companies will play out in the coming weeks and months. General Motors and Lockheed Martin this week inked a deal facilitated by the Pentagon for faster U.S. weapons production.

The U.S. military this week announced a $500 million investment loan for the rare-earth minerals company Phoenix Tailings to fund the expansion of critical metal production at the company’s Massachusetts and New Hampshire facilities. The Pentagon separately announced a $725 million investment in Denver-based Energy Fuels Inc. to scale its “domestic processing of rare earth elements.”

China has a near-monopoly on rare-earth processing and refining due to decades of investment in infrastructure and research. The investments announced this week by the Pentagon are the latest step in the Defense Department’s push to shore up the key domestic supply chains.

Phoenix Tailings CEO Nick Myers appeared on the Threat Status podcast last year and said that while the U.S. is still at the forefront of defense technology, China’s dominance of the rare-earth game is a threat.

Advanced AI systems now being used by China are a major threat, according to a report by the Center for New American Security that says the most immediate danger centers on cyber operations.

The report cites seven major Chinese AI developers — Alibaba, Baidu, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot, Tencent and Zhipu — as companies that “now produce systems with formidable capabilities across coding, reasoning, multimodal recognition and agentic tasks.” It goes on to assert that the “Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which collapses the boundaries between state, military and private sector, treats these systems as instruments of political control, economic dominance and great-power competition.”

The report urges the U.S. government to publish national security risk assessments of advanced Chinese AI systems and to issue more detailed cybersecurity alerts and advisories on the threats.

• June 18-19 — Eurosatory 2026: The Global Event for Defense and Security, COGES Events

• June 23 — Coffee Talk with Gen. Ronald Clark, Commander of the U.S. Army Pacific, Association of the United States Army

• June 23 — From Insight to Policy: Partnering with African Expertise to Inform U.S.–Africa Policy and Engagement, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• June 24 — IndoPac 2026 | Naval Dominance: Shipbuilding, Autonomy & C2, Threat Status Events

• June 25 — Navigating Competition in the Central Arctic Ocean, Hudson Institute

• June 30 — AWS Summit, AI Technologies in the Public Sector, Amazon Web Services

• July 8-9 — Military Robotics and Autonomous Systems USA Conference, SAE Media Group