The key facts

  • Emil Michael admitted that the US was “caught off guard” by the drone war in Ukraine
  • The Pentagon is now rushing to arm its troops with drones and autonomous systems
  • Bloomberg previously reported that the US lags behind Russia and China in producing cheap drones

Admission in a WSJ interview

US Deputy Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the United States could not have imagined that the conflict in Ukraine would turn into a drone confrontation. “We were caught off guard by the drone warfare waged by Ukraine and Russia,” the outlet quotes him as saying Gazeta.Ru. According to him, defense contractors and the US Department of War “were not focused on this kind of warfare.”

What is changing now

Michael emphasized that the Americans are now rushing to equip their troops with drones and other autonomous systems. He also said he wants to make sure they are prepared for scenarios “that we could envision for a conflict with Iran.” Life.ru separately notes that the official pointed to the need to take into account possible ways such technologies could be used in a conflict with Iran.

Context: lagging behind and the Ukrainian side

Michael’s admission is consistent with an earlier report Bloombergcited by Life.ru: the agency assessed that the US lags behind Russia and China in producing cheap military drones, and that scaling up output is hampered by supply chain problems and a procurement system traditionally geared toward expensive weapons. On the Ukrainian side, according to Gazeta.Ru, in October President Volodymyr Zelensky said the new Russian drones pose a serious problem for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and Stanislav Grishin, co-founder of the General Chereshnya company, noted that Kyiv is unable to effectively counter the Russian jet-powered Geran drones. In November, Serhiy Sternenko, a former adviser to former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, reported that Ukraine was close to serial production of interceptors for Russian jet-powered drones.