Pentagon $1.8B Counter-Drone Push Trains on Ukraine's Deep Strikes

The U.S. Army is rewriting its base-defense playbook after watching Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb – a series of long-range drone strikes that hit Russian air bases, ammunition depots, and logistics hubs hundreds of miles behind the front line. Senior military officials now say that any future conflict will see American bases targeted from the first minute by low-cost aerial swarms, and that the Pentagon must field a layered counter-drone system faster than its normal procurement cycle allows.

“The days of a secure rear area are over,” a senior Army official told reporters at a briefing this week. The comment came as the service tests new defenses at domestic installations, combining electronic-warfare jammers, kinetic interceptors, and directed-energy weapons.

The threat is not hypothetical. Russian forces have used Iranian-designed Shahed drones against Ukrainian infrastructure for months, while Ukraine has answered with its own long-range drones – hitting targets inside Russia and demonstrating that even well-defended airfields are vulnerable. Ukrainian crews have adapted tactics weekly, shifting launch points and attack patterns to evade Russian electronic countermeasures. That rapid iteration is what the Army now wants to replicate.

A single $20,000 drone can destroy a $20 million aircraft if it reaches its target. The math gets worse with swarms, the official said. The Army is therefore testing a layered approach: electronic jammers to disrupt drone control links at long range, kinetic shooters like the Coyote drone-killer for medium range, and high-energy lasers mounted on Stryker vehicles to burn through swarms at close range. No single system works against every threat, so the service is betting on redundancy.

“We have to assume that the enemy will try to attack every node – command posts, fuel depots, aircraft shelters, even troop barracks,” the official said. “The defense has to be as adaptive as the offense.”

The Pentagon has allocated roughly $1.8 billion for counter-drone systems across all services in the current budget cycle, with much of that going to programs like the Coyote Block 2 (built by RTX Corp., ticker RTX) and the Stryker-mounted laser (developed by Lockheed Martin Corp., ticker LMT). Both companies are likely to see a steady pipeline of orders as the Army expands its counter-drone procurement and pushes for faster fielding.

Officials acknowledged that the technology is evolving faster than traditional acquisition processes can keep up. Ukrainian forces change their drone tactics weekly; the U.S. military needs similar flexibility, they said. That has spurred the Army to experiment with modular, open-architecture systems that can accept new software or hardware upgrades without a full procurement cycle.

The service is also revising its base-defense doctrine to assume that drone attacks will accompany any conventional assault. That means hardening command-and-control nodes, dispersing aircraft and fuel stores, and training every soldier on basic drone detection and reporting. The threat, the official said, is not coming in five years – it is here now.

For defense investors, the takeaway is straightforward: the Army's newfound urgency around counter-drone systems is likely to sustain or accelerate funding for the existing programs at RTX and Lockheed Martin, and could open the door for new entrants in electronic warfare and directed energy. The $1.8 billion allocation is a floor, not a ceiling, especially if the U.S. sees its own bases come under drone surveillance or attack in theater exercises over the next 12 months.