The U.S. Army has a new ambitious program called SkyFoundry, which aims to launch its own Army production of unmanned aerial vehicles and expand cooperation with the private sector in order to produce at least one million drones within the next two to three years, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said.
According to his remarks quoted by Military Times, the Army plans under SkyFoundry to rebuild the American industrial base above all, to stimulate the drone industry as a whole.
Read more: B-21 Raider Will Fly with Single Pilot Breakthrough in Automation for U.S. Air Force
That primarily means expanding access to rare-earth materials to reduce the cost of components and organizing a system that will allow a multiple increase in drone deliveries to units.
This is not primarily an attempt to outpace the private sector the goal is to cooperate with industry but to make drones as cheap and available as possible for the force.
At this stage the Army has not disclosed exactly which drones it intends to manufacture, but most likely they will be FPV and reconnaissance types.
As program sponsor Rep. Pete Harrigan stressed, drones today account for a large share of combat losses, so the U.S. Army must establish large-scale production of these systems to avoid being left undefended.
Crucially, the program also aims to remove Chinese products from American supply chains.
It's worth noting that the U.S. military has been late to adopt some of these modern weapons for example, fiber-optic-tethered FPV drones only reached U.S. experimental use this summer, and so far mainly within the U.S. Navys tests.
Read more: Longer Range, Smarter Swarms: What russia's Drone Advances Mean for Ukraine — The Next Wave of Unmanned Threats
