China has military factories for mass producing drones, has military academies for training FPV pilots en masse, and is creating new drone technology regularly. Iran is rapidly becoming one of the leading exporters of attack drones, with its Shahed-136 costing an estimated $20,000 to build and selling for up to 20x that price. Russia is building factories to mass-produce the Shahed, and is currently estimated to produce hundreds of them each month.

In short, our enemies are counting on mass to defeat us. To counter that, we’ll need an appropriate level of mass as well.

Rather than treating attritable systems as traditional aircraft, they should be viewed and regulated as munitions—for that is what they are. Just as munitions are designed to be expendable and replaced as needed, attritable systems should be subject to a separate set of standards and regulations that prioritize affordability, simplicity, and rapid production.

Primarily, the hedge strategy incorporates small and low cost, unmanned, many, and smarter designs. Small and low-cost ensures the fielding of many resilient, disposable systems with diverse capabilities at an affordable cost that can overwhelm and confuse adversaries. Unmanned extends the operational reach and efficacy of warfighters, which also mitigates the need for larger manned forces and potentially saves lives.

Many matters because quantity is an important deterrent and provides a resilient, asymmetric advantage relative to exquisite platforms — especially in survivability. Smarter is better because software is the key to enhanced functionality of all hardware, can be updated in real time, and because AI, machine learning, and cyber can provide new capabilities as combinations of smaller systems. Such capabilities can be combined in new ways with agility in asset size, multi-domain movement, and mission capability that together offer a greater element of surprise.

Such agility compares favorably to hardware platforms that remain largely unchanged for decades. Additionally, U.S. allies and partners would benefit from a more cost-effective strategy compared to buying more large U.S. weapons platforms. Not relying on the same vendors with years-long backlogs also means that allies and partners can begin fielding these commercial technologies today.

Second, the U.S. military should better leverage emerging technologies to adopt more alternative concepts and capabilities both faster and at scale to complement existing, exquisite (meaning costly, dominant, massive, and few) weapons system platforms. An outcome of this effort will also be increased competition in defense procurement and the introduction of more and new vendors to offset a consolidating vendor base. Use of commercial technologies is also an enabler for interoperability and joint operations with allies and partners since these technologies are available today and are not classified.

Third, adopting these commercial solutions with a sense of urgency enables fielding capabilities at scale within the next three years (not decades). In contrast, a recent U.S. Army program to provide small drones took almost a decade to field capability that is available to adversaries on the internet. Additionally, the Army placed special requirements on the vendor so that the resulting cost is 17 times the price the vendor offers on the internet. During this time, Chinese drone maker DJI, the global market leader, introduced six successive generations. Moving rapidly increases deterrence since unpredictability in what we field creates uncertainty for adversaries focused on the U.S. platforms in service for decades.

Fourth, capabilities should be widely dispersed given the vast distances of the Indo-Pacific and the need for resilience and reconstitution of forces. Given China’s focus for decades on countering U.S. power projection in and around the South China Sea, the United States should now counter the Chinese military with the surprise of a much larger quantity of dispersed assets that are less expensive, more resilient, and difficult to eliminate with conventional missile defenses.

Dispersing assets is easier with smaller, autonomous, and disposable assets (rather than large weapons platforms) whose value increases when networked together to provide increased situational awareness and maneuverability over a broad area. The United States learned this lesson the hard way in 1941 at Pearl Harbor. This principle of dispersed capability is already being applied by the U.S. Marine Corps in their Force Design 2030 plan and by the U.S. Army of the Pacific under the direction of Gen. Charles Flynn, who recognizes the benefit of distributing U.S. and allied assets across the first island chain.