The globally watched “Trump-Xi summit” is expected to take place next Thursday (September 24), and observers are focused on whether the “rare earths” that China holds in its grip can serve as a trump card in negotiations with the US. But the “de-China” supply chain problem facing Washington now goes beyond rare earths — another key industry directly tied to the modern battlefield is drones.
Ukraine’s use of low-cost drones in recent months to strike deep inside Russia has made the world realize that swarms of thousands of drones have changed the old model that relied heavily on expensive, hard-to-mass-produce high-end US platforms like the “Reaper” and “Global Hawk,” completely transforming the nature of warfare worldwide.
Earlier this month, Israeli drone startup XTEND listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s drones have already been deployed on the Ukrainian battlefield, and CEO Aviv Shapira admitted in an interview that “in the drone field, the US is a full 10 years behind China.”
While that is an industry judgment, the sense of crisis in the US Congress is just as strong. In March this year, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker warned that America’s drone industry and its war-making apparatus are “years behind” in manufacturing and operating small drones. Wicker noted that China, through massive subsidies, low-cost production, and complete supply chains, now controls the vast majority of the global non-military small drone market, while US-made models can cost 5 to 25 times more than comparable Chinese products.
Current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while still a US senator in 2024, released the report “The World China Made,” which stated that China already controls about 90% of the US commercial drone market. If the US continues to outsource key industries to China on a large scale, the result will be not just commercial dependence but a strategic weakness in national security. The Russia-Ukraine war has now laid this problem completely bare.
Beijing began tightening export controls on certain dual-use drone components starting in 2024. After those policies took effect, within just one year, China’s exports of infrared equipment to the US fell by roughly 60%, while the average unit price rose to 3.5 times the original level.
Even after the US announced arms sales to Taiwan in 2024, Beijing directly imposed sanctions on top American drone maker Skydio, restricting the company’s battery supply from China, forcing it at the time to ration deliveries to customers. Skydio’s CEO publicly accused Beijing of using supply chains as a geopolitical tool. Notably, while restricting supplies to the US, China’s exports to Russia actually increased in the opposite direction — exports of some DC motors even saw a 23-fold surge at one point.
The Trump (Donald Trump) administration is now racing to fix the problem. The Pentagon’s “Drone Dominance Program” plans to acquire more than 200,000 low-cost attack drones by 2027. But US production still falls far short of true wartime needs; Ukraine alone is expected to produce 6 to 7 million FPV small attack drones this year, averaging about 500,000 per month — a scale the US simply is not at yet. The 200,000 drones the US plans to procure amount to only about 10 to 12 days of Ukraine’s output, not even counting the difficulty of ultimately “de-Chinizing” the components for these drones.
