Trump Needs Huge Drone Fleet To Defend US, Deter Its Enemies

Operation Midnight Hammer marked a dramatic demonstration of U.S. military prowess — a precisely executed, 37-hour air campaign designed to degrade Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. The strike, featuring more than a dozen B-2 stealth bombers, aerial refuelers, fighter escorts, and support from nuclear-powered submarines, validated America’s ability to project force globally and shatter robust Iranian military targets with precision.

For many, it symbolized a return to unambiguous military dominance, a moment that reinforced President Trump’s doctrine of resolve. Yet while tactically sound, the operation exposed the fragility of America’s current force structure by consuming a startling percentage of its high-end strategic assets.

Indeed, the United States expended more than half of the Air Force’s B-2 fleet and nearly half of its known GBU-57 (guided bomb unit) bunker buster inventory in a single mission. That raises serious concerns about sustainability, especially as adversaries like China and Russia maintain extensive fortified networks, including subterranean complexes like China’s “Underground Great Wall.” Unlike Iran, these adversaries are capable of operating at scale on multiple fronts and pose technologically sophisticated threats.

The success of Midnight Hammer must not lull policymakers into complacency. Awe is not strategy. If America hopes to retain superiority across multiple areas of the world, it must build for repetition. It must build for a redundant, expendable mass — which means America must invest in unmanned, expendable, and scalable weapons platforms capable of delivering persistent force across time, space, and threat.

President Trump’s decision to authorize Operation Midnight Hammer demonstrated the kind of bold leadership that only a commander-in-chief with strategic clarity and moral resolve could exercise. He acted swiftly, unflinchingly, and with a full grasp of the stakes involved — not only to neutralize a mounting nuclear threat, but to signal to both allies and adversaries that American will remains unbroken. The precision and audacity of the strike underscored his ability to effectively deploy the resources at his disposal.

That success, however, carries a corresponding obligation for the Pentagon and the broader defense industrial base: They must equip the president with the tools necessary to sustain and repeat that kind of action across future, more complex conflicts. The president brought vision and decisiveness to the battlefield; it is now the Department of Defense’s responsibility to replenish and expand the commander-in-chief’s menu options — through scalable unmanned systems (like drones), stockpiles of bombs like the GBU-57, and next-generation capabilities — so that American leadership never finds itself constrained by logistical scarcity in the face of strategic opportunity.

The Russia-Ukraine war is instructive. Russia and Ukraine are each going to build two million or more expendable (or, attritable, as the Army calls them) one-way attack drones this year. The People’s Republic of China will build one million of these drones in 2025 too, even in a period of peacetime for the nation. These are the same kinds of drones that account for almost 80 percent of casualties on both sides of the front lines.

China’s industrial focus, in particular, is a sign these kinds of systems are not a mere marker of the present conflict, but an indication of what the future will look like. By personal estimates, the United States military has not built, in aggregate across time, more than 5,000 of these drones. America is behind in a critical weapon system needed for future conflict.

This is a gap that requires a break from the standard procedures of defense contracting and procurement. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “Army Transformation Initiative” is a critical and bold start that seemed so elusive for previous administrations. Now it is time for the Pentagon to deliver on this promise.

The first step is to mobilize the defense-industrial base for the mass production of drones before war starts in order to prevent the onset of a conflict with a near-peer (like China) in the first place. For the price of one F-35, the government could subsidize the creation of enough manufacturing infrastructure to build an estimated 500,000 attritable drones per year. Again, this would be merely half of China’s current capacity, but a necessary step to be ready for war.

As the defense industry builds these drones, the military must build proficiency akin to the skill of the pilots who flew the B-2s from Missouri to Iran and back. Spending money is required to ensure soldiers and Marines maintain a stockpile for operations, while developing a prolific pace of using drones that will one day become piloted munitions in combat. Fulfilling Secretary Hegseth’s mandate to embrace one-way attack drones looks like immediate spending to ensure the resources are available in advance of war. Ukraine and Russia adapted these technologies during mass casualty combat, and the United States should learn this lesson without the carnage.

Future strategic deterrence looks much different in the Pacific than in the Middle East. On one hand, we cannot take for granted the extent to which Israel degraded Iranian combat power in advance of Midnight Hammer. Comprehensive war games from entities like the Center for Strategic and International Studies demonstrate that delivering conventional U.S. combat power across the Pacific in the event of hostilities between China and Taiwan would produce thousands of dead Americans. President Trump and military decision-makers need other options to deter Chinese aggression — and to give the United States and allied forces the ability to disrupt People’s Liberation Army forces in a way that causes them to cease an invasion.

Once again, expendable unmanned systems are an excellent option to replicate the strategic effects of Operation Midnight Hammer. Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web was the perfect encapsulation of how these unmanned systems can deliver strategic consequences for an adversary. To build out capabilities like this in the American playbook is not to replace the strategic effects of B-2 bombers or cruise missiles, but to ensure the range of options is available to President Trump for his effort to build and maintain peace through American strength.

A core component of future strength will not be a dozen or even hundreds of drones ready for war. The future is hundreds of thousands.

Will Thibeau is a veteran of the U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and serves as Director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He comments regularly on defense policy and has twice testified in front of the House of Representatives.