Drones expected to remain a DOD priority under Trump, according to SecDef nominee Hegseth

Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be Pentagon chief, made it clear to lawmakers this week that, if confirmed, he plans to prioritize the military’s adoption and integration of autonomous technologies in modern operations and enhance its ability to counter drones that continue to disrupt U.S. national security.

“Unmanned [platforms] will be a very important part of the way future wars are fought. Just the idea of survivability for human beings — to drive cost and time in ways that manned systems do not,” Hegseth said during his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

In responses to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s advanced policy questions (APQs) that were submitted to Congress ahead of that testimony, the secretary of defense nominee also made multiple statements pledging to support drone-enabling efforts across the individual military services and the joint force. 

Drones and swarms of unmanned systems are reshaping contemporary warfare and U.S. national security. Informed partly by lessons from the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, as well as still-emerging conflicts in the Middle East, Defense Department leadership during the Biden administration launched several high-dollar efforts to accelerate production and ultimately expand the military’s arsenal of such capabilities.

As senators suggested at Tuesday’s hearing, Hegseth — a former Fox News host who retired from the National Guard in 2021 at the rank of major — is considered a controversial choice for U.S. defense secretary. He dodged multiple questions from Senate Armed Services Committee Democrats during the hearing about reports of unprofessional behavior in past work environments and Trump’s vision for the DOD, among other topics.

Still, during his testimony and in his APQ responses, Hegseth spotlighted his belief that “unmanned systems are a fundamental part of the future warfighting environment.”

At one point in the more than three-hour-long hearing, he pointed to significant challenges U.S. shipyards are confronting with manpower issues and other workforce shortfalls, and how unmanned systems could offset those.

“We also see adversaries that have been able to innovate themselves in ways that their ship-building capacity is — I won’t reveal it at this hearing — but multitudes and multitudes beyond our capabilities. So it needs to be a rapid investment, a rapid-field issue, and then we need to incentivize outside entities to fill the gap. You talk a lot about [unmanned aerial vehicles]. UAVs are very important. But there’s also a picture of UUVs — unmanned underwater vehicles — that will be a part of amplifying the impact of our Navy, because this administration has allowed our number of ships to drop below 300,” Hegseth told the committee.

In his APQ answers regarding the Navy, he said the DOD needs to “expeditiously move to integrate unmanned systems in [its] surface and undersea fleets.” 

“If confirmed, I will direct the Service Secretaries, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment, and the Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering to accelerate adoption and integration of cost-effective and highly capable unmanned systems to transition to the force of the future,” Hegseth wrote.

Further, if lawmakers confirm his nomination, Hegseth said he would also prioritize enhancing the Marine Corps’ ability to operate in contested littoral operation environments — “emphasizing long-range precision fires, advanced reconnaissance, and unmanned systems to support distributed operations.”

The nominee additionally committed to comprehensively examining how the Pentagon can best further its missions to counter larger UAS. Notably, he left open the potential for a reallocation of roles and responsibilities with respect to the Joint Counter Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Office (JCO).

Currently, the Army functions as DOD’s executive agent for that office.

“The conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have reinforced the need for the Department to effectively counter small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS), and that is inherently a Joint effort. If confirmed, I will wholeheartedly support the effort to effectively counter sUAS to ensure that the Joint Force has the protection it needs,” Hegseth wrote.

Following this hearing, Hegseth’s nomination now faces a vote of the full Senate for confirmation.