By Mike Stone
WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) - The Pentagon official tasked with building a domestic drone industry said on Monday the United States is still in the earliest, hardest phase of that effort, acknowledging output remains a fraction of Ukraine's production even as the government tightens rules requiring drones be built with American-made parts.
Travis Metz, deputy director and chief operating officer of the Defense Innovation Unit who has run the Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program since
last fall, said in an interview that Ukraine will produce between six and seven million small first-person-view attack drones this year, or roughly 500,000 a month.
By comparison, the Pentagon's $1.1 billion program will have ordered just under 200,000 drones cumulatively by February. "It's much harder to get from zero to 200,000" than it will be to scale up further once a domestic capacity to build many more drones exists, Metz said.
But the Pentagon just made a big surge in drone building much tougher when it instituted rules that military drones must be made with U.S. parts. A revised supply chain framework released July 23 adds language stating the government's ultimate goal is "a wholly domestic" small unmanned aircraft system supply chain.
Metz acknowledged that harder-to-source components, including semiconductors, remains a far bigger problem for the U.S. outside the drone effort.
None of the drones from the 19 companies competing an August test event may contain banned parts like Chinese-made brushless motors or battery packs, Metz said, a stricter standard than the program's first phase.
"It's an increasingly difficult thing," he said, estimating that "the vast majority" of drones purchased in an earlier phase likely contained Chinese motors.
Still, he said he expects the U.S. to eventually rival Ukraine's drone industry. "I see no reason why we shouldn't ... be the world champions of this as well," he said.
Metz said all six Ukrainian companies invited to next month's "Gauntlet II" test at Fort Carson, Colorado, have entered or are moving toward joint ventures with U.S. manufacturers as a condition of future orders.
Ukrainian company F-Drones has partnered with Ohio-based Ukrainian Defense Drones, which opened a facility near Toledo, while Ukrainian drone maker General Cherry has agreed to a joint venture with New Hampshire's Wilcox Industries, according to the companies.
Metz said the Ukrainian companies competing in Gauntlet II are being required to localize production in the U.S. as a condition of winning future orders, a structure designed to convert Ukraine's battlefield expertise into American manufacturing capacity rather than reliance on imports.
(Reporting by Mike Stone in WashingtonEditing by Nick Zieminski)
