--- title: "Did America Just Create a Secret New Military Branch? Inside the Pentagon's $54.6 Billion DAWG Program" description: "On the seventh of April, 2026, the United States Pentagon did something that should have been unremarkable. It issued its budget request for the upcoming fiscal year — essentially a wish-list asking America to pay for all the aircraft, ships, missiles, tanks, and black-budget mysteries that make its military so potent. In Washington, the request is a big deal for the pencil-pushers and policy wonks who live for this sort of thing. For everyone else, it is the kind of document you would only read if you were trying to put yourself to sleep.\n\nBut this year, the Pentagon's list of requests featured something very strange: a request to set aside $54.6 billion for a program that the vast majority of Americans had never heard of. To put that number in perspective, $54.6 billion is roughly the annual revenue of companies like American Airlines, Tyson Foods, Intel, General Dynamics, or Uber. It is a sum close to the GDPs of Zimbabwe, Latvia, Cambodia, Libya, or Bahrain. And, more to the point, it is just shy of the 2026 budget of the entire United States Marine Corps, significantly more than the 2026 budget for America's Space Force, and roughly equivalent to the 2026 budget for all American classified programs combined.\n\nSo where is the Pentagon sending such astronomical sums of money for the coming fiscal year? That would be the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group — better known as DAWG. The scale of the request, applied to a program almost nobody has heard of, points to a single conclusion: the United States appears to be on the verge of standing up an entirely new branch of its military, dedicated to drone warfare.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The Pentagon's April 2026 budget request set aside $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), a program funded at just $225 million in fiscal 2026 — an increase of over 24,000 percent that points to the funding of an entire new military branch, not an experimental program.\n- DAWG is the rebranded successor to the Biden-era Replicator program, placed under US Special Operations Command and refocused from general drone research to preparing explicitly for a potential conflict with China, prioritizing larger, long-range, one-way attack drones that can operate in GPS- and radio-jammed environments.\n- A separate Drone Dominance program handles smaller FPV-style drones integrated at the unit level, mirroring Ukraine's two-track model — but Major General Steven Marks confirmed both programs are connected under a single strategic layer.\n- America's current arsenal has hard limits: of 187 F-22s, only around 125 fly combat roles, and at a 40 percent readiness rate perhaps 30 could realistically respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan against hundreds of Chinese stealth fighters — making a dedicated drone force strategically essential.\n\n## A Program Nobody Had Heard Of\n\nIf you have never heard of a unit called DAWG, you are not alone. It has only been formally acknowledged under that name for less than a year, and the programs that led up to its existence were founded as recently as 2023. In fiscal year 2026, the DAWG program was allotted just $225 million. That means if the Pentagon's request for the coming year is approved, the program's funding will increase by over 24,000 percent.\n\nThose sums simply cannot be explained away as a new initiative or a single new piece of technology. This is the amount of money you would need to fund an entire new branch of the military. And the evidence — the budget, the structure, the stated priorities — points in exactly that direction.\n\nTo understand what the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group actually is, and what the Pentagon seems to want to do with it, you have to turn back the clock to 2023 and an initiative called Replicator.\n\n## Rising From the Replicator\n\nDrawn up under then-President Joe Biden, Replicator was the US military's first real foray into cutting-edge drone warfare. The United States already understood how to use some types of drones — strike and reconnaissance platforms like the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk. But Replicator was an attempt to grapple with a very different style of drone warfare, based on what America and the rest of the world was observing on the battlefields of Ukraine.\n\nBy that time, Ukrainian and Russian forces had already shown the world how small, cheap, and disposable drones were changing the nature of warfare itself. Moscow and especially Kyiv were using consumer-grade drone technology to carry out kamikaze attacks, round-the-clock battlefield surveillance, and short-range strike missions. Their drones could be mass-produced in garage workshops or underground bunkers, and they could destroy tanks and heavy fighting vehicles for a tiny fraction of what those armored vehicles cost.\n\nEven in the early years of the conflict, it was obvious that drone technology was developing extraordinarily quickly — and that the tech had allowed a smaller, poorer, and vastly inferior military to stand up to a major power. For the United States, that presented both a problem and an opportunity. Fail to keep up with Ukraine-style drone warfare, and America could be vulnerable against even its less-capable adversaries. But master that technology for its own use, and Washington could be even stronger than it already was.\n\n## Ambition Meets Reality\n\nReplicator was America's first attempt to respond, and to the credit of its architects, it was nothing if not ambitious. The program was expected to seek out innovative, cheap drone designs from a wide range of American startups, build a system for Washington to solicit and evaluate those designs, and then produce copies of the very best of them in the thousands. That was a big, scary step for a US defense industry where long-term contracts and decades-long procurement timelines remain the status quo even today.\n\nIn some ways, Replicator succeeded. The US held competitions and selected a handful of drones with real promise, while funding software advances to enable coordinated drone swarms and autonomous operations. But the program also had plenty of problems — and not just because of the defense industry's reluctance to adapt. Replicator ran into technical obstacles, faced political opposition in Congress, and exposed the military's deep institutional fears about this kind of work.\n\nCommitting to new, unproven technology was scary enough. Committing to new, unproven technology that was expected to rapidly become obsolete and then be replaced was scarier still. Making matters worse, many of Replicator's drones simply did not pass muster. According to Western defense officials speaking anonymously with WarFronts, several Replicator designs were complete failures when tested under real combat conditions.\n\n## From Replicator to DAWG\n\nDespite its challenges, the program escaped the quick and quiet demise that some defense experts had anticipated when Biden handed the keys of the White House to Donald Trump for his second term. Instead, Replicator was rebranded as the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG. It was first formally acknowledged by Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of America's Indo-Pacific Command, in December 2025, and first reported a few months earlier by the Wall Street Journal.\n\nUnlike other legacy programs from the Biden era, the Trump administration did not see Replicator as irrelevant or wasteful. Its fear was the opposite — that the program was moving too slowly. A share of US lawmakers had already been convinced of its value and were pushing to spend more, not by a few percentage points but by doubling, tripling, or quadrupling its expenditures. Replicator technology that had not worked, or that was too expensive or too slow to manufacture at the required scale, would have to be abandoned. Washington's drone software, meanwhile, was already in need of a massive overhaul to have any value going forward.\n\nTo match the administration's new vision, DAWG was placed under the purview of US Special Operations Command, where decisions tend to be more streamlined, institutional thinking more flexible, and fast-tracked programs more likely to survive. Washington also shifted the program's focus — from a general-purpose inquiry into drone technology to an explicit effort to prepare for a future conflict with China.\n\n## Built for the Pacific\n\nAs the focus shifted, so did the program's demands. The Pentagon was now hunting for autonomous drones that could cross long distances and handle themselves in radio- and GPS-jammed environments. At the same time, the US would need cheap, mass-deployable systems that could be adapted to island-hopping warfare or flooded into Taiwan, Okinawa, and South Korea to support a first-stage defense against a Chinese invasion.\n\nBy late 2025, according to Admiral Paparo, DAWG drones were already being tested and war-gamed in secure environments. A high-ranking Pentagon undersecretary, Emil Michael, added that the program was now prioritizing larger drones, while smaller, first-person-view, Ukraine-type drones had become the purview of a separate effort: the Drone Dominance Initiative.\n\nBut the sheer scale of the budget the Pentagon is now requesting suggests DAWG has matured and evolved even faster than was previously understood. This is a program that worked with less than a quarter-billion dollars in 2026, set against $54.6 billion in 2027 if the Pentagon gets its wish. That is simply not a sum that goes toward an experimental program, no matter how important. It is a figure directly comparable to the budget of the United States Marine Corps — a branch with more active-duty personnel than the entire British, Italian, or Spanish militaries, and more combat aircraft than Japan, South Korea, France, or Saudi Arabia. WarFronts cannot say for certain what the Pentagon is planning. But if we had to guess, we would expect Washington is on the verge of announcing a standalone Drone Force as a brand-new branch of the United States military.\n\n## Why Warfare Itself Is Changing\n\nAfter four full years of war in Ukraine, and after confirmation across conflict zones from Iran to Myanmar to the Sahel to even Mexican cartel country, most global militaries finally agree: warfare itself is changing. It may be changing on a scale unseen since World War I, when armored tanks, weaponized aircraft, modern artillery and machine guns, and mass chemical warfare all arrived at roughly the same time and turned war into something unrecognizable from just two decades earlier.\n\nIn some ways, today's evolution is easier to grasp, because most of it traces back to unmanned fighting technology in one form or another. But where chemical warfare, armed aircraft, and heavy tanks each thrived in specific domains, with lessons that did not transfer across them, drone technology is the opposite. Autonomous expendable weapons, intelligent swarm software, and the other elements that make drones so valuable can be transferred to platforms on air, land, sea, or even space.\n\nThe United States is also in a unique position to absorb another shift in modern warfare. Once the world's sole superpower after the Cold War, the US is adjusting to the fact that it cannot simply run counterinsurgency campaigns forever. Rising powers like China, and declining but unpredictable powers like Russia, pose a real threat to American military might. Yet even as America prepares to face those adversaries, it does not have to prepare for the same style of warfare the Allies encountered against Germany or Japan in World War II.\n\n## Denial, Not Domination\n\nAs defense journalist Sydney Freedberg Jr. wrote for Breaking Defense in late 2025: \"the US military is looking at more formidable adversaries and realizing it doesn't have to dominate them, just deny them their objectives. Kyiv and its allies don't have to march on Moscow: They win if Russia can't conquer Ukraine. Taipei and its allies don't have to burn Beijing: They win if China can't conquer Taiwan.\"\n\nThis strategy has real value for Washington. China and Russia do not want to lose wars, and they probably will not want to fight them if they believe strategic failure is inevitable. But convincing those powers that war with the USA is a bad idea is not easy, and the limitations of America's current arsenal make the task harder.\n\nTake the F-22 Raptor, America's premier stealth air-superiority fighter. It is hard to know with absolute certainty that the F-22 would beat China's J-20 head-to-head, since the two have never met in live combat. The F-22 seems to be the superior aircraft — which is all well and good until practical considerations intrude. America's F-22 production lines have long since closed. Of 187 operational aircraft, only around 125 fly in a combat role. By the end of 2024, the F-22's force readiness was at just 40 percent, meaning perhaps 50 of those 125 are ready for battle at any given time. Some are needed for homeland defense, others for Europe — so, being generous, perhaps 30 F-22s could actually respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in ideal circumstances. There, they and their F-35 counterparts would face hundreds of Chinese stealth fighters, plus everything else in China's combat air wing.\n\n## The Logistics of Fighting China\n\nThat is only an introductory example. America's challenges grow considerably more severe once the logistics of fighting an adversary like China are factored in. American combat aircraft would have to operate with minimal aerial refueling support, because US airlifters could not come close enough to Chinese-controlled airspace to keep those jets near the fight for any sustained period.\n\nAmerican warships would have to contend with an incredible concentration of Chinese vessels in the South China Sea, hell-bent on securing the waterway and isolating Taiwan, so that the handful of US warships on the periphery would risk being sunk if they tried to intervene. Nor would the US have an easy path to reinforce Taiwan with ground troops once China established local control, since both its troop-transport ships and its un-stealthy airlifters would be exposed to retaliation.\n\nWorst of all, China is producing ships, aircraft, ground vehicles, and other key assets at a pace America simply cannot match. It would take many years and investments on an incomprehensible scale for America to catch up — and that is not going to happen. A dedicated American drone force, however, could change the game completely, using the same tactics and strategies Ukraine has already proven effective against Russia.\n\n## The Ukrainian Blueprint\n\nIn the air, long-range Ukrainian drones have devastated Russian supply lines and destroyed units preparing to move to the front, striking energy, infrastructure, and military targets at ranges of hundreds or even thousands of kilometers with stunning regularity. Ukrainian sea drones have sunk numerous warships, including high-value targets like Russia's former Black Sea flagship, the Moskva — which has now been involuntarily modified to serve as a stationary submarine.\n\nIn each case, Ukraine's long-range drones have enabled massive damage and strategic gains for relatively little cost. Russia has done the same, including with Iranian-designed drones that proved so effective that even America is now copying the designs almost exactly, in the form of Washington's new LUCAS drone — first built in Iran as the Shahed-136. At closer range, front-line drone units have delivered such devastation that, according to Western officials, Ukrainian and Russian drones now account for roughly 87 percent of all wartime casualties across both sides.\n\nFor a superpower like the United States, there are two ways to read Ukraine's success. Option one is to get defensive and claim Washington does not have to stoop to such crude measures when it can rely on the trappings of a modern military Ukraine could only dream of. In the short term, that brings real benefits: planners need not adapt, major defense contractors keep guzzling contracts for existing hardware, and political leaders avoid the risks of advocating change. The other option is to look at Ukraine's success and ask: if Ukraine can achieve all of this with a much smaller budget, a startup-driven defense industry, and zero prep time, just imagine what the United States could accomplish if it devoted its resources to mastering this new domain.\n\n## The Two-Track Model\n\nJust as important as innovation is America's willingness to operate at scale. Ukraine learned the hard way that it is easiest to incorporate drones on a two-track model. Track one is full integration at the unit level across existing branches: infantry units get their own FPV drones and specially trained operators, naval units get sea drones, logistics units get logistics drones, intelligence units get intelligence drones, and so on. Track two is a dedicated drone force, known in Ukraine as the Unmanned Systems Forces — the first dedicated drone branch of any global military. Russia has since taken a similar approach, creating its own Unmanned Systems Force in late 2025 while still relying on drone operators across the front lines regardless of their formal branch.\n\nLook closely at what America is doing, and it appears to be implementing a very similar approach. The DAWG force on track to receive almost $55 billion would be the basis for a future dedicated drone force, focused, in the words of the Pentagon undersecretary overseeing it, on \"larger drones, one-way attack drones.\" Larger drones mean longer range or larger payload, or both — the sort that could fly or float for hundreds or thousands of kilometers if needed.\n\nThese are the drones that would be particularly challenging for China if it attempted an invasion of Taiwan by sea. The US would not have to put its ships or aircraft at nearly as much risk if it could send waves of thousands of aerial and sea drones to harass, overwhelm, and sink the Chinese vessels transporting Beijing's landing force. That issue of scale is central to the case for a dedicated, separate drone branch: with enough human operators in the loop and enough drones available, the US could conceivably coordinate tens of thousands of drones at a time, forming successive waves through a mix of autonomous positioning, human-directed attack, and self-coordinating swarm-network software.\n\n## Drone Dominance and the Need for Speed\n\nSeparate from DAWG's focus on larger one-way attack drones, the Pentagon is also setting up the Drone Dominance program, focused on FPV-style drone support at the unit level. This is the effort that would mirror Ukraine-style integration across the other branches — ensuring the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marines each have access to the drones they need and understand how to use them in real time.\n\nAs the Ukraine war has shown, truly modern warfare demands efficient, real-time decision-making around the clock, as close to the small-unit level as possible, with as little command-and-control as possible to keep things moving at peak efficiency. The battlefields of Ukraine are constantly monitored by surveillance drones, with strike and kamikaze drones available at a moment's notice, so that even at the slowest, the latency between a target's detection and its elimination is typically less than 60 seconds.\n\nThat reaction speed is impossible if a military must call in a separate, dedicated drone force every time it wants to carry out an FPV strike. It is impossible if units must waste time getting approval from a command apparatus at anything beyond the battalion level — and even that is pushing it. The two tracks are designed to solve different problems: speed at the front, and scale at the strategic level.\n\n## One Initiative, Not Two\n\nLook a little closer, and DAWG and Drone Dominance are not actually separate at all. In March 2026 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the current director of the DAWG program, Major General Steven Marks, explained that \"Drone Dominance will meet the demands of the warfighter. Concurrently, the DAWG is ensuring that those capabilities are connected to operational as well as Service modernization efforts… together, we are building the new institutional muscle memory required to ensure the United States maintains its decisive advantage in this new era of warfare.\"\n\nDecoded from Senate-testimony language, Marks is describing the two-track model: dedicated units to handle the more complex, time-intensive, and resource-demanding operations, and smaller-scale technology designed to be integrated at the front lines. Marks also indicated a layer of decision-making oversight on the DAWG side — dictating strategy, evaluating needs, and providing what warfighters actually need, when they need it.\n\nAgain, this mirrors Ukraine's model. There, front-line units obtain their weapons through a digital marketplace called Brave1 — essentially a drone-warfare version of an online marketplace — that is overseen, with its weapons catalog managed, by dedicated strategic leaders and drone experts.\n\n## A Fast-Moving Timeline\n\nBy every current indicator, the United States is getting ready to move quickly. The Drone Dominance program is clearly the subordinate effort, now expected to require roughly $1.1 billion over the next eighteen months — but it is targeting procurement of over 200,000 one-way drones deployed to the field by January 2028, a deadline less than two years away.\n\nThe designs that program requires, and the work needed to test, choose, buy, and create the supply chains to distribute and maintain them, will most likely fall to the much larger DAWG program, which has both the money and, very soon, the manpower to manage those larger issues. The Pentagon has also laid out expectations that more firms be vetted and their supply chains cleared of foreign-built components wherever possible — a defense-industrial effort well beyond the capabilities of a small front-line drone program. The $54.6 billion request, again for a single fiscal year, is far more appropriate to that task.\n\nIn the periphery of the military's day-to-day operations, these efforts are already underway. In January 2026, a Pentagon initiative called Swarm Forge saw small teams of troops guide drone swarms to take out simulated tank units. In June, the Pentagon will test drone-swarm technology from across the defense industry in an exercise called the Crucible, where companies will compete to demonstrate swarms that could be delivered to operational units just ninety days later. The Drone Dominance program is planning several rounds of its own competitive gauntlets to find one-way attack drone designs that combine the lowest possible cost with maximum impact. And in Iran, the Iranian-inspired LUCAS drone is already scoring hits.\n\n## The Speculative Leap to a Drone Force\n\nWe should be very clear that the final point here is speculative. WarFronts has not been able to confirm this assessment via the US government. But with that much money allocated to DAWG, and with such a precise to-do list spanning so many areas of American drone defense, we expect the program is just months away from taking the leap into a fully fledged Autonomous Warfare Command.\n\nOnce that command exists, with a budget as large as the Pentagon wants to supply, its next task will be to build an entire branch of the US military to support its efforts. That means strike and logistics commands, and training to operate and coordinate drones in the field. It means defense-industrial partnerships with both established and startup partners in private industry. It means the creation of new operational commands, new strategic doctrine, and new tactics — borrowed from Ukraine or Russia, but adapted for an American arsenal. And it means training, not just to teach Drone Force units to operate their own technology, but to teach personnel up and down the US military to use drones the way their Ukrainian counterparts already do.\n\nThe US is clearly trying to learn the lessons of the Ukraine war while pushing past the entrenched problems and inefficiencies of the American defense industry. But America is not Ukraine, and Ukraine's capabilities, remarkable as they are, are still just a fraction of what America could achieve if it leveraged drone technology to its fullest potential. Warfare is changing faster than it has in many generations, and every nation faces a choice: be on the cutting edge, or fall behind. WarFronts cannot confirm anything officially — but it certainly seems the United States has a plan to stake out its place on the cutting edge. If that read is right, America's entire approach to warfare is about to change.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is DAWG and where did it come from?\n\nDAWG is the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the rebranded successor to the Biden-era Replicator drone initiative. Replicator was the US military's first real foray into Ukraine-style drone warfare, aiming to source cheap, innovative drone designs from American startups and produce the best in the thousands. It had successes — selected promising designs and funded swarm software — but also faced technical failures, political opposition, and institutional resistance. DAWG was first formally acknowledged under that name by Admiral Samuel Paparo in December 2025 and was placed under US Special Operations Command for faster, more flexible decision-making.\n\n### Why is the $54.6 billion budget request so significant?\n\nIn fiscal year 2026, DAWG was allotted just $225 million. The Pentagon's April 2026 request of $54.6 billion represents an increase of over 24,000 percent — a sum nearly equal to the entire US Marine Corps budget, larger than the Space Force budget, and roughly equivalent to the 2026 budget for all American classified programs. WarFronts argues that a figure that large points not to an experimental program but to the funding of an entirely new military branch dedicated to drone warfare.\n\n### How is DAWG preparing for a potential conflict with China?\n\nDAWG's focus shifted from general-purpose drone research to explicitly preparing to deny China its objectives in a future conflict. It prioritizes larger, long-range, one-way attack drones that can operate in GPS- and radio-jammed environments and be deployed into places like Taiwan, Okinawa, and South Korea. The idea is to send waves of thousands of aerial and sea drones to overwhelm and sink Chinese vessels carrying an invasion force, without exposing US ships and aircraft to the same level of risk.\n\n### What is the difference between DAWG and the Drone Dominance program?\n\nDAWG focuses on larger, one-way attack drones and serves as the strategic, resource-managing layer of America's drone effort. The Drone Dominance program handles smaller FPV-style drones integrated at the unit level across the existing branches. According to Major General Steven Marks in March 2026 Senate testimony, the two are connected: Drone Dominance meets immediate warfighter demands while DAWG ties those capabilities to broader service modernization. Drone Dominance is the subordinate effort, targeting procurement of over 200,000 one-way drones by January 2028 at a cost of roughly $1.1 billion over eighteen months.\n\n### Why can't America rely on its existing arsenal to deter China?\n\nThe F-22 illustrates the problem. Production lines are closed; of 187 operational aircraft only around 125 fly combat roles, and at a 40 percent readiness rate perhaps 30 could realistically respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — against hundreds of Chinese stealth fighters. Beyond that, American airlifters cannot safely approach Chinese-controlled airspace, US warships would face an overwhelming Chinese naval concentration in the South China Sea, and China is producing ships, aircraft, and ground vehicles at a pace America simply cannot match, making a dedicated drone force strategically essential.\n\n## Related Coverage\n\n- [Drone Blitz: The Future of Unmanned Warfare](/military/drone-blitz-future-of-unmanned-warfare)\n- [America Isn't Ready for the Drone Warfare Era](/military/america-not-ready-drone-warfare-era)\n- [America's Unmanned Naval Fleet: Ghost Ships, Drone Submarines, and Delays](/military/america-unmanned-naval-fleet-ghost-ships-drone-submarines-delays)\n\n## Sources\n\n1. https://aviationweek.com/defense/budget-policy-operations/debrief-pentagons-little-known-dawg-fetches-546b-spending-plan\n2. https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-revenue/page/3/\n3. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/12/19/replicator-an-inside-look-at-the-pentagons-ambitious-drone-program/\n4. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/replicator-on-track-cheap-drones/\n5. https://www.brookings.edu/events/replicator-and-beyond-the-future-of-drone-warfare/\n6. https://inkstickmedia.com/deep-dive-pentagons-replicator-initiative-raises-questions/\n7. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-pentagons-replicator-program-falls-short-goals-deploy-ai-weapons-wsj-reports-2025-09-27/\n8. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-replicator-drone-program-cost-500-million-per-year-pentagon-says-2024-03-11/\n9. https://breakingdefense.com/2025/12/its-alive-biden-era-replicator-drone-initiative-lives-on-as-dawg-looking-at-bigger-uass/\n10. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-ai-weapons-delay-0f560d7e\n11. https://insidedefense.com/daily-news/funding-new-autonomous-drone-warfare-group-slated-skyrocket-546b-fy-27\n12. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/diu-offers-100m-in-prizes-for-voice-controlled-ai-enabled-drone-swarm-orchestrator/\n13. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-recruitment-students.html\n14. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-says-it-is-employing-new-integrated-drone-infantry-warfare-system-2026-04-15/\n15. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-drones-students-soldiers-b2951791.html\n16. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-woos-students-its-drone-forces-ukraine-with-large-financial-packages-2026-04-02/\n17. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drone-military-innovation-ukraine-russia-us-iran-60-minutes/\n18. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/want-drone-dominance-let-the-squad-fail/\n19. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/04/feinberg-should-create-a-drpm-for-drones/\n20. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/15/politics/drone-us-military-russia-ukraine\n21. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/27/pentagon-drone-technology-deficiency-00525058\n22. https://www.csis.org/analysis/unleashing-us-military-drone-dominance-what-united-states-can-learn-ukraine\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/secret-new-military-branch-pentagon-drone-force-dawg.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/secret-new-military-branch-pentagon-drone-force-dawg datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/s2Dg3JQGnDM/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: 33eb25c42f1a62ac0e42e5611908dba85f9b56491faab3fb4238692e4416812f tokens: 7667 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/secret-new-military-branch-pentagon-drone-force-dawg.md.summary.md --- On the seventh of April, 2026, the United States Pentagon did something that should have been unremarkable. It issued its budget request for the upcoming fiscal year — essentially a wish-list asking America to pay for all the aircraft, ships, missiles, tanks, and black-budget mysteries that make its military so potent. In Washington, the request is a big deal for the pencil-pushers and policy wonks who live for this sort of thing. For everyone else, it is the kind of document you would only read if you were trying to put yourself to sleep. But this year, the Pentagon's list of requests featured something very strange: a request to set aside $54.6 billion for a program that the vast majority of Americans had never heard of. To put that number in perspective, $54.6 billion is roughly the annual revenue of companies like American Airlines, Tyson Foods, Intel, General Dynamics, or Uber. It is a sum close to the GDPs of Zimbabwe, Latvia, Cambodia, Libya, or Bahrain. And, more to the point, it is just shy of the 2026 budget of the entire United States Marine Corps, significantly more than the 2026 budget for America's Space Force, and roughly equivalent to the 2026 budget for all American classified programs combined. So where is the Pentagon sending such astronomical sums of money for the coming fiscal year? That would be the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group — better known as DAWG. The scale of the request, applied to a program almost nobody has heard of, points to a single conclusion: the United States appears to be on the verge of standing up an entirely new branch of its military, dedicated to drone warfare. ## Key Takeaways - The Pentagon's April 2026 budget request set aside $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), a program funded at just $225 million in fiscal 2026 — an increase of over 24,000 percent that points to the funding of an entire new military branch, not an experimental program. - DAWG is the rebranded successor to the Biden-era Replicator program, placed under US Special Operations Command and refocused from general drone research to preparing explicitly for a potential conflict with China, prioritizing larger, long-range, one-way attack drones that can operate in GPS- and radio-jammed environments. - A separate Drone Dominance program handles smaller FPV-style drones integrated at the unit level, mirroring Ukraine's two-track model — but Major General Steven Marks confirmed both programs are connected under a single strategic layer. - America's current arsenal has hard limits: of 187 F-22s, only around 125 fly combat roles, and at a 40 percent readiness rate perhaps 30 could realistically respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan against hundreds of Chinese stealth fighters — making a dedicated drone force strategically essential. ## A Program Nobody Had Heard Of If you have never heard of a unit called DAWG, you are not alone. It has only been formally acknowledged under that name for less than a year, and the programs that led up to its existence were founded as recently as 2023. In fiscal year 2026, the DAWG program was allotted just $225 million. That means if the Pentagon's request for the coming year is approved, the program's funding will increase by over 24,000 percent. Those sums simply cannot be explained away as a new initiative or a single new piece of technology. This is the amount of money you would need to fund an entire new branch of the military. And the evidence — the budget, the structure, the stated priorities — points in exactly that direction. To understand what the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group actually is, and what the Pentagon seems to want to do with it, you have to turn back the clock to 2023 and an initiative called Replicator. ## Rising From the Replicator Drawn up under then-President Joe Biden, Replicator was the US military's first real foray into cutting-edge drone warfare. The United States already understood how to use some types of drones — strike and reconnaissance platforms like the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk. But Replicator was an attempt to grapple with a very different style of drone warfare, based on what America and the rest of the world was observing on the battlefields of Ukraine. By that time, Ukrainian and Russian forces had already shown the world how small, cheap, and disposable drones were changing the nature of warfare itself. Moscow and especially Kyiv were using consumer-grade drone technology to carry out kamikaze attacks, round-the-clock battlefield surveillance, and short-range strike missions. Their drones could be mass-produced in garage workshops or underground bunkers, and they could destroy tanks and heavy fighting vehicles for a tiny fraction of what those armored vehicles cost. Even in the early years of the conflict, it was obvious that drone technology was developing extraordinarily quickly — and that the tech had allowed a smaller, poorer, and vastly inferior military to stand up to a major power. For the United States, that presented both a problem and an opportunity. Fail to keep up with Ukraine-style drone warfare, and America could be vulnerable against even its less-capable adversaries. But master that technology for its own use, and Washington could be even stronger than it already was. ## Ambition Meets Reality Replicator was America's first attempt to respond, and to the credit of its architects, it was nothing if not ambitious. The program was expected to seek out innovative, cheap drone designs from a wide range of American startups, build a system for Washington to solicit and evaluate those designs, and then produce copies of the very best of them in the thousands. That was a big, scary step for a US defense industry where long-term contracts and decades-long procurement timelines remain the status quo even today. In some ways, Replicator succeeded. The US held competitions and selected a handful of drones with real promise, while funding software advances to enable coordinated drone swarms and autonomous operations. But the program also had plenty of problems — and not just because of the defense industry's reluctance to adapt. Replicator ran into technical obstacles, faced political opposition in Congress, and exposed the military's deep institutional fears about this kind of work. Committing to new, unproven technology was scary enough. Committing to new, unproven technology that was expected to rapidly become obsolete and then be replaced was scarier still. Making matters worse, many of Replicator's drones simply did not pass muster. According to Western defense officials speaking anonymously with WarFronts, several Replicator designs were complete failures when tested under real combat conditions. ## From Replicator to DAWG Despite its challenges, the program escaped the quick and quiet demise that some defense experts had anticipated when Biden handed the keys of the White House to Donald Trump for his second term. Instead, Replicator was rebranded as the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG. It was first formally acknowledged by Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of America's Indo-Pacific Command, in December 2025, and first reported a few months earlier by the Wall Street Journal. Unlike other legacy programs from the Biden era, the Trump administration did not see Replicator as irrelevant or wasteful. Its fear was the opposite — that the program was moving too slowly. A share of US lawmakers had already been convinced of its value and were pushing to spend more, not by a few percentage points but by doubling, tripling, or quadrupling its expenditures. Replicator technology that had not worked, or that was too expensive or too slow to manufacture at the required scale, would have to be abandoned. Washington's drone software, meanwhile, was already in need of a massive overhaul to have any value going forward. To match the administration's new vision, DAWG was placed under the purview of US Special Operations Command, where decisions tend to be more streamlined, institutional thinking more flexible, and fast-tracked programs more likely to survive. Washington also shifted the program's focus — from a general-purpose inquiry into drone technology to an explicit effort to prepare for a future conflict with China. ## Built for the Pacific As the focus shifted, so did the program's demands. The Pentagon was now hunting for autonomous drones that could cross long distances and handle themselves in radio- and GPS-jammed environments. At the same time, the US would need cheap, mass-deployable systems that could be adapted to island-hopping warfare or flooded into Taiwan, Okinawa, and South Korea to support a first-stage defense against a Chinese invasion. By late 2025, according to Admiral Paparo, DAWG drones were already being tested and war-gamed in secure environments. A high-ranking Pentagon undersecretary, Emil Michael, added that the program was now prioritizing larger drones, while smaller, first-person-view, Ukraine-type drones had become the purview of a separate effort: the Drone Dominance Initiative. But the sheer scale of the budget the Pentagon is now requesting suggests DAWG has matured and evolved even faster than was previously understood. This is a program that worked with less than a quarter-billion dollars in 2026, set against $54.6 billion in 2027 if the Pentagon gets its wish. That is simply not a sum that goes toward an experimental program, no matter how important. It is a figure directly comparable to the budget of the United States Marine Corps — a branch with more active-duty personnel than the entire British, Italian, or Spanish militaries, and more combat aircraft than Japan, South Korea, France, or Saudi Arabia. WarFronts cannot say for certain what the Pentagon is planning. But if we had to guess, we would expect Washington is on the verge of announcing a standalone Drone Force as a brand-new branch of the United States military. ## Why Warfare Itself Is Changing After four full years of war in Ukraine, and after confirmation across conflict zones from Iran to Myanmar to the Sahel to even Mexican cartel country, most global militaries finally agree: warfare itself is changing. It may be changing on a scale unseen since World War I, when armored tanks, weaponized aircraft, modern artillery and machine guns, and mass chemical warfare all arrived at roughly the same time and turned war into something unrecognizable from just two decades earlier. In some ways, today's evolution is easier to grasp, because most of it traces back to unmanned fighting technology in one form or another. But where chemical warfare, armed aircraft, and heavy tanks each thrived in specific domains, with lessons that did not transfer across them, drone technology is the opposite. Autonomous expendable weapons, intelligent swarm software, and the other elements that make drones so valuable can be transferred to platforms on air, land, sea, or even space. The United States is also in a unique position to absorb another shift in modern warfare. Once the world's sole superpower after the Cold War, the US is adjusting to the fact that it cannot simply run counterinsurgency campaigns forever. Rising powers like China, and declining but unpredictable powers like Russia, pose a real threat to American military might. Yet even as America prepares to face those adversaries, it does not have to prepare for the same style of warfare the Allies encountered against Germany or Japan in World War II. ## Denial, Not Domination As defense journalist Sydney Freedberg Jr. wrote for Breaking Defense in late 2025: "the US military is looking at more formidable adversaries and realizing it doesn't have to dominate them, just deny them their objectives. Kyiv and its allies don't have to march on Moscow: They win if Russia can't conquer Ukraine. Taipei and its allies don't have to burn Beijing: They win if China can't conquer Taiwan." This strategy has real value for Washington. China and Russia do not want to lose wars, and they probably will not want to fight them if they believe strategic failure is inevitable. But convincing those powers that war with the USA is a bad idea is not easy, and the limitations of America's current arsenal make the task harder. Take the F-22 Raptor, America's premier stealth air-superiority fighter. It is hard to know with absolute certainty that the F-22 would beat China's J-20 head-to-head, since the two have never met in live combat. The F-22 seems to be the superior aircraft — which is all well and good until practical considerations intrude. America's F-22 production lines have long since closed. Of 187 operational aircraft, only around 125 fly in a combat role. By the end of 2024, the F-22's force readiness was at just 40 percent, meaning perhaps 50 of those 125 are ready for battle at any given time. Some are needed for homeland defense, others for Europe — so, being generous, perhaps 30 F-22s could actually respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in ideal circumstances. There, they and their F-35 counterparts would face hundreds of Chinese stealth fighters, plus everything else in China's combat air wing. ## The Logistics of Fighting China That is only an introductory example. America's challenges grow considerably more severe once the logistics of fighting an adversary like China are factored in. American combat aircraft would have to operate with minimal aerial refueling support, because US airlifters could not come close enough to Chinese-controlled airspace to keep those jets near the fight for any sustained period. American warships would have to contend with an incredible concentration of Chinese vessels in the South China Sea, hell-bent on securing the waterway and isolating Taiwan, so that the handful of US warships on the periphery would risk being sunk if they tried to intervene. Nor would the US have an easy path to reinforce Taiwan with ground troops once China established local control, since both its troop-transport ships and its un-stealthy airlifters would be exposed to retaliation. Worst of all, China is producing ships, aircraft, ground vehicles, and other key assets at a pace America simply cannot match. It would take many years and investments on an incomprehensible scale for America to catch up — and that is not going to happen. A dedicated American drone force, however, could change the game completely, using the same tactics and strategies Ukraine has already proven effective against Russia. ## The Ukrainian Blueprint In the air, long-range Ukrainian drones have devastated Russian supply lines and destroyed units preparing to move to the front, striking energy, infrastructure, and military targets at ranges of hundreds or even thousands of kilometers with stunning regularity. Ukrainian sea drones have sunk numerous warships, including high-value targets like Russia's former Black Sea flagship, the Moskva — which has now been involuntarily modified to serve as a stationary submarine. In each case, Ukraine's long-range drones have enabled massive damage and strategic gains for relatively little cost. Russia has done the same, including with Iranian-designed drones that proved so effective that even America is now copying the designs almost exactly, in the form of Washington's new LUCAS drone — first built in Iran as the Shahed-136. At closer range, front-line drone units have delivered such devastation that, according to Western officials, Ukrainian and Russian drones now account for roughly 87 percent of all wartime casualties across both sides. For a superpower like the United States, there are two ways to read Ukraine's success. Option one is to get defensive and claim Washington does not have to stoop to such crude measures when it can rely on the trappings of a modern military Ukraine could only dream of. In the short term, that brings real benefits: planners need not adapt, major defense contractors keep guzzling contracts for existing hardware, and political leaders avoid the risks of advocating change. The other option is to look at Ukraine's success and ask: if Ukraine can achieve all of this with a much smaller budget, a startup-driven defense industry, and zero prep time, just imagine what the United States could accomplish if it devoted its resources to mastering this new domain. ## The Two-Track Model Just as important as innovation is America's willingness to operate at scale. Ukraine learned the hard way that it is easiest to incorporate drones on a two-track model. Track one is full integration at the unit level across existing branches: infantry units get their own FPV drones and specially trained operators, naval units get sea drones, logistics units get logistics drones, intelligence units get intelligence drones, and so on. Track two is a dedicated drone force, known in Ukraine as the Unmanned Systems Forces — the first dedicated drone branch of any global military. Russia has since taken a similar approach, creating its own Unmanned Systems Force in late 2025 while still relying on drone operators across the front lines regardless of their formal branch. Look closely at what America is doing, and it appears to be implementing a very similar approach. The DAWG force on track to receive almost $55 billion would be the basis for a future dedicated drone force, focused, in the words of the Pentagon undersecretary overseeing it, on "larger drones, one-way attack drones." Larger drones mean longer range or larger payload, or both — the sort that could fly or float for hundreds or thousands of kilometers if needed. These are the drones that would be particularly challenging for China if it attempted an invasion of Taiwan by sea. The US would not have to put its ships or aircraft at nearly as much risk if it could send waves of thousands of aerial and sea drones to harass, overwhelm, and sink the Chinese vessels transporting Beijing's landing force. That issue of scale is central to the case for a dedicated, separate drone branch: with enough human operators in the loop and enough drones available, the US could conceivably coordinate tens of thousands of drones at a time, forming successive waves through a mix of autonomous positioning, human-directed attack, and self-coordinating swarm-network software. ## Drone Dominance and the Need for Speed Separate from DAWG's focus on larger one-way attack drones, the Pentagon is also setting up the Drone Dominance program, focused on FPV-style drone support at the unit level. This is the effort that would mirror Ukraine-style integration across the other branches — ensuring the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Marines each have access to the drones they need and understand how to use them in real time. As the Ukraine war has shown, truly modern warfare demands efficient, real-time decision-making around the clock, as close to the small-unit level as possible, with as little command-and-control as possible to keep things moving at peak efficiency. The battlefields of Ukraine are constantly monitored by surveillance drones, with strike and kamikaze drones available at a moment's notice, so that even at the slowest, the latency between a target's detection and its elimination is typically less than 60 seconds. That reaction speed is impossible if a military must call in a separate, dedicated drone force every time it wants to carry out an FPV strike. It is impossible if units must waste time getting approval from a command apparatus at anything beyond the battalion level — and even that is pushing it. The two tracks are designed to solve different problems: speed at the front, and scale at the strategic level. ## One Initiative, Not Two Look a little closer, and DAWG and Drone Dominance are not actually separate at all. In March 2026 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the current director of the DAWG program, Major General Steven Marks, explained that "Drone Dominance will meet the demands of the warfighter. Concurrently, the DAWG is ensuring that those capabilities are connected to operational as well as Service modernization efforts… together, we are building the new institutional muscle memory required to ensure the United States maintains its decisive advantage in this new era of warfare." Decoded from Senate-testimony language, Marks is describing the two-track model: dedicated units to handle the more complex, time-intensive, and resource-demanding operations, and smaller-scale technology designed to be integrated at the front lines. Marks also indicated a layer of decision-making oversight on the DAWG side — dictating strategy, evaluating needs, and providing what warfighters actually need, when they need it. Again, this mirrors Ukraine's model. There, front-line units obtain their weapons through a digital marketplace called Brave1 — essentially a drone-warfare version of an online marketplace — that is overseen, with its weapons catalog managed, by dedicated strategic leaders and drone experts. ## A Fast-Moving Timeline By every current indicator, the United States is getting ready to move quickly. The Drone Dominance program is clearly the subordinate effort, now expected to require roughly $1.1 billion over the next eighteen months — but it is targeting procurement of over 200,000 one-way drones deployed to the field by January 2028, a deadline less than two years away. The designs that program requires, and the work needed to test, choose, buy, and create the supply chains to distribute and maintain them, will most likely fall to the much larger DAWG program, which has both the money and, very soon, the manpower to manage those larger issues. The Pentagon has also laid out expectations that more firms be vetted and their supply chains cleared of foreign-built components wherever possible — a defense-industrial effort well beyond the capabilities of a small front-line drone program. The $54.6 billion request, again for a single fiscal year, is far more appropriate to that task. In the periphery of the military's day-to-day operations, these efforts are already underway. In January 2026, a Pentagon initiative called Swarm Forge saw small teams of troops guide drone swarms to take out simulated tank units. In June, the Pentagon will test drone-swarm technology from across the defense industry in an exercise called the Crucible, where companies will compete to demonstrate swarms that could be delivered to operational units just ninety days later. The Drone Dominance program is planning several rounds of its own competitive gauntlets to find one-way attack drone designs that combine the lowest possible cost with maximum impact. And in Iran, the Iranian-inspired LUCAS drone is already scoring hits. ## The Speculative Leap to a Drone Force We should be very clear that the final point here is speculative. WarFronts has not been able to confirm this assessment via the US government. But with that much money allocated to DAWG, and with such a precise to-do list spanning so many areas of American drone defense, we expect the program is just months away from taking the leap into a fully fledged Autonomous Warfare Command. Once that command exists, with a budget as large as the Pentagon wants to supply, its next task will be to build an entire branch of the US military to support its efforts. That means strike and logistics commands, and training to operate and coordinate drones in the field. It means defense-industrial partnerships with both established and startup partners in private industry. It means the creation of new operational commands, new strategic doctrine, and new tactics — borrowed from Ukraine or Russia, but adapted for an American arsenal. And it means training, not just to teach Drone Force units to operate their own technology, but to teach personnel up and down the US military to use drones the way their Ukrainian counterparts already do. The US is clearly trying to learn the lessons of the Ukraine war while pushing past the entrenched problems and inefficiencies of the American defense industry. But America is not Ukraine, and Ukraine's capabilities, remarkable as they are, are still just a fraction of what America could achieve if it leveraged drone technology to its fullest potential. Warfare is changing faster than it has in many generations, and every nation faces a choice: be on the cutting edge, or fall behind. WarFronts cannot confirm anything officially — but it certainly seems the United States has a plan to stake out its place on the cutting edge. If that read is right, America's entire approach to warfare is about to change. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is DAWG and where did it come from? DAWG is the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, the rebranded successor to the Biden-era Replicator drone initiative. Replicator was the US military's first real foray into Ukraine-style drone warfare, aiming to source cheap, innovative drone designs from American startups and produce the best in the thousands. It had successes — selected promising designs and funded swarm software — but also faced technical failures, political opposition, and institutional resistance. DAWG was first formally acknowledged under that name by Admiral Samuel Paparo in December 2025 and was placed under US Special Operations Command for faster, more flexible decision-making. ### Why is the $54.6 billion budget request so significant? In fiscal year 2026, DAWG was allotted just $225 million. The Pentagon's April 2026 request of $54.6 billion represents an increase of over 24,000 percent — a sum nearly equal to the entire US Marine Corps budget, larger than the Space Force budget, and roughly equivalent to the 2026 budget for all American classified programs. WarFronts argues that a figure that large points not to an experimental program but to the funding of an entirely new military branch dedicated to drone warfare. ### How is DAWG preparing for a potential conflict with China? DAWG's focus shifted from general-purpose drone research to explicitly preparing to deny China its objectives in a future conflict. It prioritizes larger, long-range, one-way attack drones that can operate in GPS- and radio-jammed environments and be deployed into places like Taiwan, Okinawa, and South Korea. The idea is to send waves of thousands of aerial and sea drones to overwhelm and sink Chinese vessels carrying an invasion force, without exposing US ships and aircraft to the same level of risk. ### What is the difference between DAWG and the Drone Dominance program? DAWG focuses on larger, one-way attack drones and serves as the strategic, resource-managing layer of America's drone effort. The Drone Dominance program handles smaller FPV-style drones integrated at the unit level across the existing branches. According to Major General Steven Marks in March 2026 Senate testimony, the two are connected: Drone Dominance meets immediate warfighter demands while DAWG ties those capabilities to broader service modernization. Drone Dominance is the subordinate effort, targeting procurement of over 200,000 one-way drones by January 2028 at a cost of roughly $1.1 billion over eighteen months. ### Why can't America rely on its existing arsenal to deter China? The F-22 illustrates the problem. Production lines are closed; of 187 operational aircraft only around 125 fly combat roles, and at a 40 percent readiness rate perhaps 30 could realistically respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — against hundreds of Chinese stealth fighters. Beyond that, American airlifters cannot safely approach Chinese-controlled airspace, US warships would face an overwhelming Chinese naval concentration in the South China Sea, and China is producing ships, aircraft, and ground vehicles at a pace America simply cannot match, making a dedicated drone force strategically essential. ## Related Coverage - [Drone Blitz: The Future of Unmanned Warfare](/military/drone-blitz-future-of-unmanned-warfare) - [America Isn't Ready for the Drone Warfare Era](/military/america-not-ready-drone-warfare-era) - [America's Unmanned Naval Fleet: Ghost Ships, Drone Submarines, and Delays](/military/america-unmanned-naval-fleet-ghost-ships-drone-submarines-delays) ## Sources 1. https://aviationweek.com/defense/budget-policy-operations/debrief-pentagons-little-known-dawg-fetches-546b-spending-plan 2. https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-revenue/page/3/ 3. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2023/12/19/replicator-an-inside-look-at-the-pentagons-ambitious-drone-program/ 4. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/replicator-on-track-cheap-drones/ 5. https://www.brookings.edu/events/replicator-and-beyond-the-future-of-drone-warfare/ 6. https://inkstickmedia.com/deep-dive-pentagons-replicator-initiative-raises-questions/ 7. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-pentagons-replicator-program-falls-short-goals-deploy-ai-weapons-wsj-reports-2025-09-27/ 8. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-replicator-drone-program-cost-500-million-per-year-pentagon-says-2024-03-11/ 9. https://breakingdefense.com/2025/12/its-alive-biden-era-replicator-drone-initiative-lives-on-as-dawg-looking-at-bigger-uass/ 10. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-ai-weapons-delay-0f560d7e 11. https://insidedefense.com/daily-news/funding-new-autonomous-drone-warfare-group-slated-skyrocket-546b-fy-27 12. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/diu-offers-100m-in-prizes-for-voice-controlled-ai-enabled-drone-swarm-orchestrator/ 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-recruitment-students.html 14. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-says-it-is-employing-new-integrated-drone-infantry-warfare-system-2026-04-15/ 15. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukraine-drones-students-soldiers-b2951791.html 16. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-woos-students-its-drone-forces-ukraine-with-large-financial-packages-2026-04-02/ 17. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/drone-military-innovation-ukraine-russia-us-iran-60-minutes/ 18. https://mwi.westpoint.edu/want-drone-dominance-let-the-squad-fail/ 19. https://breakingdefense.com/2026/04/feinberg-should-create-a-drpm-for-drones/ 20. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/15/politics/drone-us-military-russia-ukraine 21. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/27/pentagon-drone-technology-deficiency-00525058 22. https://www.csis.org/analysis/unleashing-us-military-drone-dominance-what-united-states-can-learn-ukraine <!-- youtube:s2Dg3JQGnDM -->