The Pentagon has placed the largest drone order in American history, buying 30,000 one-way attack drones as it pushes to build a fleet of more than 300,000 by early 2028. The order lands as Washington tries to catch up with a battlefield revolution that has already rewritten modern war.
The scale is striking because the United States is not just buying hardware; it is trying to build a wartime manufacturing base fast enough to keep up with the pace of combat. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in June titled Unleashing American Drone Dominance, and the next month Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo calling for a buildup in drone manufacturing through purchases of hundreds of American products. The 2026 defense budget also sets aside $13.6 billion for autonomous systems, underscoring how central drones have become to military planning.
What makes the rush more urgent is the supply chain behind the machines. According to Goldman Sachs, roughly 98% of the world's magnets are manufactured in China, and the magnets powering nearly every drone in Ukraine came from there as well. Ukraine built over 1.2 million drones in 2024, a pace that has turned unmanned systems into a defining feature of the war over the past two years. That battlefield lesson is now driving Pentagon procurement, even as the department says at least 80,000 components across 1,900 U.S. weapons systems depend on Chinese-sourced rare earths.
The Pentagon is already trying to break that dependence. Last year it took a $400 million equity stake in MP Materials and became the company's largest shareholder, a rare move that showed how seriously it views the minerals problem. MP Materials is making progress on the light rare earth side, including neodymium and praseodymium, but that does not solve the fuller problem of heavy rare earths, where China still dominates. REalloys says it holds the only fully non-Chinese mine-to-magnet heavy rare earth supply chain in North America, a claim that speaks to how few domestic alternatives exist.
The tension in the Pentagon's drone push is simple: it wants American volume, but it still leans on a global supply chain it does not control. A force built to scale past 300,000 drones by early 2028 will need motors, magnets and other components in quantities the United States has not produced at that level for years. The next test is whether the government can turn policy announcements and equity stakes into a reliable industrial base before the demand for drones outruns the supply of the materials that make them fly.
