The Drone Supply Chain: A New Front in Industrial Warfare

The war in Ukraine has shown that drone warfare is a game of logistics. The side that can build, repair, and deploy drones faster will have a decisive advantage. This SITREP goes beyond the drones themselves to analyze the new, high-stakes battleground: the supply chain. We explore the challenges of sourcing components, from microchips to carbon fiber, in a globalized market, and the urgent need to build a resilient, domestic manufacturing base for critical drone components.

We have entered a new era of industrial warfare, and its central battleground is the drone supply chain. The war in Ukraine has been a brutal, real-world stress test, and it has revealed a critical vulnerability in the Western way of war: we are not prepared for a conflict of mass and attrition. For decades, we have focused on building small numbers of exquisite, high-tech platforms. But what happens when the battlefield consumes thousands of drones per month? The side that can build, repair, and deploy drones faster will have a decisive advantage. This is a game of logistics.

The modern drone is a marvel of globalization. Its components come from all over the world: a camera from one country, a GPS module from another, a carbon fiber frame from a third. This globalized supply chain is a model of efficiency in peacetime, but it is a crippling vulnerability in wartime. A single missing component, a single blocked shipping lane, can bring the entire production line to a halt. We have, in effect, allowed our adversaries to have a vote in our ability to wage war.

This is a problem that we must solve, and we must solve it now. We need to build a resilient, domestic manufacturing base for critical drone components. This does not mean that we need to build every single microchip and every single propeller here at home. But it does mean that we need to have a clear understanding of our supply chain vulnerabilities, and a plan to mitigate them. We need to identify the critical components that are sourced from high-risk countries, and we need to invest in creating domestic or allied alternatives.

This is not just a job for the government; it is a whole-of-nation effort. It will require investment from the private sector, innovation from our universities, and a new way of thinking from the military. We need to create a new, public-private partnership that is focused on building the resilient, secure, and responsive drone supply chain of the future.

At ROE Defense, we are already working on this problem. We are designing our drones to be modular, so they can be easily repaired and upgraded in the field. We are working with our partners to build a more resilient supply chain. And we are developing the automated manufacturing techniques that will allow us to produce drones at the speed and scale required for a 21st-century conflict. The drone supply chain is a new front in the great power competition, and it is a front that we cannot afford to lose.