Opinion | Ukraine’s naval drone success holds a huge lesson for the U.S. Navy

How did Ukraine pull off this improbable feat? Part of the explanation can be found in its use of potent anti-ship cruise missiles, including the domestically produced Neptune, which in 2022 sank the Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. But Ukraine has also innovated brilliantly by developing its own unmanned surface vessels, which can hunt Russian warships in wolf packs.

Both the Magura V5 and the Sea Baby are essentially unmanned speedboats that can be packed with explosives or even fire their own missiles. They are equipped with cameras and satellite links that allow distant controllers to steer them toward their targets, they travel fast (up to 50 mph), and they are made of materials difficult to detect on radar. Best of all, they are cheap to produce and don’t put any Ukrainian personnel at risk. Drones costing only a few hundred thousand dollars are sinking multimillion-dollar warships that can take years to manufacture.

“Anyone who thinks this isn’t a game changer for the future of war just has their wishful blinders on,” P.W. Singer of the New America think tank told me.

James Stavridis, a retired admiral and former NATO commander, agreed. “We are at an absolute pivot point in maritime warfare,” he told me in an email. “Big surface ships are highly at risk to air, surface, and sub-surface drones. The sooner great-power navies like that of the United States understand that, the more likely they are to survive in major combat in this turbulent 21st century. Like the battleship row destroyed at Pearl Harbor, carriers are at the twilight of their days. It is absolutely time to move the rheostat of procurement away from manned warships and toward more numerous and far less expensive unmanned vessels.”

U.S. military leaders recognize, at a conceptual level, the changing nature of warfare. My colleagues David Ignatius and Josh Rogin have recently highlighted the U.S. military’s efforts to integrate drones into its operations. The Navy has done extensive testing of unmanned systems in the Persian Gulf and has established two squadrons of unmanned surface vessels in the Pacific. Navy commanders realize that drones — which can operate on the sea’s surface as well as above it and below it — could be of vital importance in defeating any Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan.

But the U.S. military still hasn’t put the necessary resources behind cutting-edge unmanned systems because it remains so firmly wedded to its manned “legacy” platforms. The Replicator initiative announced last year is a positive step: It is a Pentagon-wide attempt to bypass cumbersome procurement rules and get drones into the U.S. operating forces as quickly as possible. But Replicator is budgeted for only $500 million a year, and it’s meant to cover all the service branches. By contrast, the Navy’s shipbuilding budget for fiscal 2025 is $32 billion — and almost all of that money is going to crewed warships, including frigates, destroyers and aircraft carriers (costing up to $13 billion a pop) that are likely to be fat targets for Chinese drones, submarines and missiles.

It’s not all the Navy’s fault: Like the other services, it is at the mercy of the “iron triangle” of defense contractors, Pentagon bureaucrats and members of Congress. In 2022, the Navy tried to retire nine littoral combat ships that had been plagued by mechanical problems and that would stand no chance in a high-intensity conflict with China, but Congress mandated that five of the ships remain in service because decommissioning them would hurt members’ districts. The littoral combat ship program ultimately might wind up costing taxpayers $100 billion without providing any useful warfighting capacity.

While there is plenty of blame to go around, the bottom line is that the Navy remains essentially a 20th-century fighting force. “The Navy is definitely being too slow to adopt drone technologies,” Lorin Selby, a retired rear admiral and former chief of naval research, told me. “The good news is there is finally recognition that drones do and will play a role in naval warfare. The bad news is the budgets don’t yet reflect that.”

Likewise, Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who advises the Navy on new technologies, told me via email: “I do think the Navy has been ‘missing the boat’ on the potential of uncrewed vessels. … The Navy has been experimenting with larger uncrewed vessels for several years, but those efforts have not resulted in any programs moving into procurement. That is disappointing.”

It isn’t just the U.S. Navy that is “missing the boat.” So are some American allies that would benefit the most from drones. When I was in Taiwan last year, I was shocked to discover how little effort the island has made to integrate unmanned systems into its military forces. Taiwan continues to spend precious defense dollars on manned ships and aircraft, and even on artillery systems and tanks.

Bing West, a former assistant secretary of defense, wrote in a recent National Review article that Taiwan is allocating only 1 percent of its military budget to drones, and aims to field only 700 military-grade drones and 7,000 commercial grade drones. Impoverished Ukraine, by contrast, is building at least 1 million drones a year and losing as many as 10,000 in combat every month.

West argues that Taiwan “should reallocate at least $4 billion to develop a suite of 1 million drones, varying from simple kamikazes to AI-enhanced predators.” If a 2,000-ship Chinese invasion fleet (rivaling the Allied armada on D-Day in 1944) were to head for the island, Taiwan could target each Chinese ship with 500 drones. The Philippines is another U.S. ally that faces a Chinese maritime threat and needs to shift to drones to defend itself.

According to T.X. Hammes, a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, the rise of unmanned systems is giving an advantage to defense over offense, making it harder for attackers to advance. That’s good news from the U.S. perspective, given that America is a status-quo power seeking to stop China from rewriting the map of the western Pacific in its favor. But the United States and its allies aren’t taking full advantage of this new technology. “Navies are inherently conservative organizations,” Hammes told me, “so I expect change will be fairly slow.”

The problem is the United States and its allies can’t afford to wait: At leader Xi Jinping’s direction, China’s military is rapidly building up its forces so that it can be ready by 2027 to conquer Taiwan if called upon. There is not a moment to lose in preparing an effective defense, and drones need to be on the front lines.