Zelensky draws an ace: Ukraine’s attack drones and the new strategies dominating modern warfare

Last year President Donald Trump warned his Ukrainian counterpart that he “had no cards” to play when seeking American aid against Russia’s invasion. 

Then Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky drew an ace: Ukraine’s remarkable development, from scratch, of military drones that are now dominating the eastern European battlefield. Now, the United States wants in on Ukraine’s drone industry and manufacturing know-how to equip its own military for future conflicts. 

The United States’ own difficulties dealing with Iran’s use of one-way attack drones in the ongoing Middle East conflict has added urgency to the Pentagon-led effort to equip its own forces with the technology.  

Warming of relations between Washington and Kyiv

Ukraine’s ability to manufacture hundreds of thousands of deadly drones each month, both affordably and rapidly, is of particular interest to U.S. leaders who frequently deal with cost overruns and delays from the country’s largest arms manufacturers. 

The warming of relations between Washington and Kyiv has coincided with Ukraine’s development of a powerhouse drone industry and promises to invest in production in the United States. 

“Important technology. This is what we have. And America has great technology. Our drone deal is win-win,” Zelensky told MAGA influencer Laura Loomer in an interview.  “We will build a ​great factory in the United States. We want to [have] lines of production.”

The Tuesday meeting in Washington, which was not open to the press, was a diplomatic success for President Zelensky, who just last year sat in the same Oval Office and faced a withering onslaught from Vice President JD Vance and President Trump over what the pair viewed as the Ukrainian leader’s reluctance to engage in diplomacy with Russia. 

The relationship has come a long way since that first meeting of Trump's second term. Last month, President Trump indicated that the pair had actually developed a “good relationship” since. 

“It’s hard to believe, correct, from the Oval Office to now... I think we’ve developed a very good relationship,” Trump said at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Ankara, Turkey in June. 

U.S. wants to partner with Ukraine’s drone industry

"We would buy their drones [...] And, you know, if we made that deal, we'd have great protection. I love the protection," Trump told reporters at the same press conference. 

“They have an ability to make a lot of them, which is [...] it’s amazing, that in a war situation they make them,” the American president added, praising Ukraine’s manufacturing capability in the middle of the war with Russia.

Ukraine’s rapid adoption of drone technology in warfare, as well as its rapid manufacturing build-out to produce them, is a success that U.S. military officials wish to learn from in order to boost America’s own production and prepare its troops for future conflict.

As drones have increasingly become central to Kyiv’s war strategy, the country is expected to manufacture between 6 and 7 million attack drones in 2026 at a rate of about 500,000 per month. The relatively cheap drones, known as first-person-view (FPV) attack drones, are used by the Ukrainian armed forces to threaten expensive Russian platforms and personnel. 

Ukraine is also using domestically produced one-way attack drones with a longer range to strike targets deep inside Russian territory, such as oil refineries and military targets.

The Pentagon official responsible for the U.S. Drone Dominance Program, Travis Metz, admitted ahead of Zelensky’s visit that Ukraine was outperforming the United States in its drone manufacturing capacity—an advantage the United States wants to learn from. 

The Pentagon’s program, by contrast, is currently on track to produce just under 200,000 drones by February. "It's much harder to get from zero to 200,000,” Metz told Reuters. But, he said, it will be much easier for the U.S. to boost production to similar levels once the domestic capacity to build drones exists. 

The United States plans to bring the know-how to the United States by encouraging Ukrainian companies to start joint ventures and manufacture drones in the United States. 

For example, Ukrainian Defense Drones announced earlier this month that it would open an $18.4 million facility in Holland, Ohio. The company is the American arm of F-Drones. The factory will fulfill an initial Pentagon order for 200,000 drones. 

The Pentagon invited six Ukrainian companies to the Gauntlet II test in Fort Carson, Colorado next month. Each of these Ukrainian companies either has signed or is planning joint ventures with U.S. manufacturers. 

How drones are changing warfare

In addition to getting their hands on more drones, U.S. officials have come to see Ukraine’s value in teaching the United States how to fight in the wars of the future, where drones dominate battlefields and threaten more expensive military equipment vulnerable to them. 

In the conflict, Ukrainian drone operators have used the cheap weapons to attack Russian infantry, destroy tanks, and cripple Russian navy ships in the Black Sea. More recently, Ukraine’s long-range drones have struck targets deep inside the Russian heartland, including oil refineries, retail warehouses, and military facilities. 

Some analysts credit Ukraine’s wholesale adoption of drone warfare for blunting Russia’s momentum and halting its slow advance on the battlefield, which was fueled by its advantage in both manpower and equipment. Between December 2025 and April 2026, Ukrainian drones caused 156,735 Russian personnel losses. Russia reported that it recruited roughly 148,400 replacement troops over the same period, meaning drone-inflicted losses exceeded recruitment.

Earlier this year, War Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress that he personally approved sending U.S. military personnel to Ukraine in order to observe its use of drones in warfare. 

“I’ve personally approved additional personnel there to learn from that drone battlefield, both on offense and defense,” he told lawmakers in May. He said that the Pentagon would work to incorporate those lessons, Forbes reported. 

Iran war showed threat of drones to U.S. forces

The United States was confronted directly with the threats, and opportunities, that come with drone warfare amid the conflict with Iran. In the opening days of the conflict with Washington, Tehran fired waves of drones against U.S. bases and allies in the Middle East. It exposed the threat drones pose to expensive U.S. systems on the ground and forced U.S. Central Command and Arab Gulf states to deploy expensive interceptor munitions to shoot down the comparatively cheap Iranian platforms.

The situation prompted Secretary Hegseth to summon the leaders of America’s largest military contractors in June to urge them to boost production of depleted weapons stocks, Just the News previously reported. 

The Pentagon recognized the growing importance of drones in warfare early in President Trump’s second term. In July 2025, Hegseth issued a memo on “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” outlining a mission to boost U.S. drone manufacturing. Less than one year later, the U.S. military employed one-way attack drones, called the Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS), for the first time. The system is modeled after Iranian Shahed drones. 

Before the conflict with Iran began, Ukraine offered its assistance to the United States after years of defending its territory and troops from Iran’s Shaheds used by Russia’s military. However, President Trump initially dismissed those offers. 

Ukraine reportedly pitched its technology to take down Iranian-produced Shaheds months before the outbreak of the Iran war earlier this year, only to be rebuffed by Washington. Axios reported in March that Ukrainian officials approached Washington in 2025 with a pitch to sell the battle-proven technology to protect American troops in case of war with Iran, but U.S. officials decided not to move forward.

By March, the United States reversed course as it grappled with Iran’s drone arsenal at the height of the war. Though President Trump continued to insist publicly that the United States did not need Ukraine’s help, by the time of the July NATO conference in Turkey, he was publicly praising Ukraine’s drone industry.