Army’s big drone ambition runs into the hard part: scaling up

ROCK ISLAND ARSENAL, Ill. — The U.S. Army is racing to turn its aging organic industrial base into a modern drone factory network — and learning just how hard it is to move from prototypes to mass production.

“We know how to manufacture things. There’s not a problem with that, but UAS, they are different,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, acting commander of Materiel Command, told Defense News in a recent interview. “We can do the wiring harnesses. We could do some of the microelectronics, but either we don’t have the capability, such as the brushless motors, and we have to buy the machinery to do that.”

The Army’s push comes amid lessons from the war in Ukraine, where inexpensive drones and loitering munitions have reshaped the battlefield and overwhelmed conventional forces.

Ukraine and Ru