The Sixty-Day Mirage: Why CENTCOM's Drone Task Forces Cannot Close the China Gap

The Sixty-Day Mirage

CENTCOM’s new drone task forces promise to deliver autonomous systems in sixty days or less. China produces ten million drones annually. The gap between these two realities is not a problem of speed. It is a problem of category.

In July 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum titled “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” that acknowledged an uncomfortable truth: “Our adversaries collectively produce millions of cheap drones each year.” The response—a pair of task forces, aggressive timelines, and procurement reforms—treats the challenge as one of bureaucratic friction. Remove the obstacles, and American industry will surge to match Chinese output.

This is magical thinking dressed in management consulting language.

The question is not whether CENTCOM’s Rapid Employment Joint Task Force can move faster than traditional acquisition. It already does. The question is whether speed at the edges of a system can compensate for structural deficiencies at its core. The answer, examined through the lens of industrial capacity, supply chain dependencies, and the physics of scaling, is almost certainly no.

The Arithmetic of Asymmetry

Start with the numbers. China’s drone output in 2024 reached $29.4 billion—at least four times what the United States spent. DJI alone commands over ninety percent of global consumer drone sales. The country produces roughly ten million drones annually across all segments. These figures represent not a lead but a different industrial ecosystem entirely.

The United States, by contrast, produces drones the way it produces fighter jets: in small batches, with exquisite specifications, at extraordinary cost. A Quora analysis of production economics captures the disparity: a drone that costs $500,000 to manufacture in America might cost $50,000—or less—in China. The tenfold differential is not primarily about labor costs. It reflects fundamentally different relationships between military and civilian production, between state capacity and market structure, between what counts as acceptable quality and what counts as acceptable risk.

CENTCOM’s LUCAS program illustrates the dynamic. The one-way attack drone, reverse-engineered from Iranian Shahed-136 designs, costs approximately $193,000 per unit. The Shahed it copies costs Iran roughly $20,000. The blueprint transferred. The cost structure did not.

Why? Because cost is not a design parameter. It is an emergent property of an entire industrial ecosystem—supply chains, labor markets, regulatory environments, quality expectations, liability structures. The United States successfully captured the drone’s technical specifications while failing to replicate the actual strategic advantage: the ability to lose thousands of units without fiscal pain.

The Replicator initiative, announced by Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks in 2023, aimed to field “multiple thousands” of autonomous systems within eighteen to twenty-four months. The ambition was correct. The timeline was fantasy. Two years later, the initiative has produced prototypes and demonstrations but not the industrial transformation required for mass production.

Why Speed Cannot Substitute for Scale

CENTCOM’s task forces represent genuine innovation in military procurement. The Rapid Employment Joint Task Force, led by Chief Technology Officer Joy Shanaberger, promises sixty-day delivery cycles. Task Force Scorpion Strike oversees the military’s first one-way attack drone squadron based in the Middle East. Both bypass traditional acquisition pathways. Both move faster than anyone expected.

None of this addresses the fundamental constraint.

The sixty-day promise functions as what organizational theorists call a “boundary object”—a metric simultaneously measurable enough to satisfy acquisition bureaucracy, ambitious enough to satisfy Congressional oversight, and vague enough about what constitutes “delivery” to satisfy everyone else. Delivering a prototype in sixty days is achievable. Delivering ten thousand units in sixty days requires industrial capacity that does not exist.

Consider the supply chain. Reuters reporting on drone production dependencies reveals that Chinese manufacturers’ specific battery form factors—ultra-thin configurations, curved geometries, high-capacity cells—have become design constraints that determine American drone airframe geometry, weight distribution, and operational capabilities. You cannot simply substitute components. The architecture assumes Chinese inputs.

Executive Order 14307, signed in June 2025, directs agencies to “prioritize the integration of UAS manufactured in the United States” and tasks the Commerce Department with securing the drone supply chain against foreign control. The order acknowledges the problem. It does not solve it. China’s rare earth dominance extends beyond finished drones to the materials that make drones possible. Lithium. Cobalt. Rare earth elements for motors and sensors. The dependency runs deeper than assembly.

The Defense Innovation Unit’s transition rate offers a cautionary tale. DIU exists precisely to accelerate technology adoption. Its transition rate—the percentage of prototypes that become programs of record—fell from seventeen projects in fiscal year 2022 to ten in fiscal year 2023, a forty-one percent decline. Successful prototypes enter what acquisition professionals call the “valley of death”: a funding gap where innovative technologies prove ineligible for most of the defense budget’s “colors of money.”

CENTCOM’s task forces may move prototypes faster. They cannot move the budget structures that determine whether prototypes become production lines.

The Doctrine of Disposability

Ukraine provides the laboratory for understanding what mass drone warfare actually requires. The Ukrainian military loses approximately 1,500 drones per month. The U.S. Air Force considers three percent monthly Reaper attrition “unsustainable.” These are not differences of degree. They are differences of kind.

The gap reflects fundamentally different operational logics. American military culture treats each loss as a failure requiring investigation, accountability, and procedural revision. Ukrainian military culture treats losses as the cost of doing business in a war of attrition. The former produces exquisite systems operated by highly trained personnel. The latter produces expendable systems operated by soldiers trained in weeks.

Neither approach is wrong. But only one scales.

Iran’s drone program demonstrates what the expendable model enables. Iranian Shahed drones have transformed Russian operations in Ukraine not through sophistication but through volume. The drones are slow, loud, and relatively easy to intercept individually. In swarms, they overwhelm air defenses through sheer numbers. The defender faces a cost-inversion trap: a $400 FPV drone forces the expenditure of a $100,000 interceptor.

This arithmetic creates a structural forcing function. High-attrition disposable doctrine becomes the only economically viable choice regardless of military preference. The defender cannot sustain a precision-centric approach against an adversary willing to accept massive losses.

CENTCOM operates in a theater where this dynamic is already visible. Houthi drone attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea have forced American warships to expend million-dollar missiles against thousand-dollar threats. The task forces aim to provide cheaper countermeasures and cheaper offensive options. The aim is correct. The scale remains inadequate.

The Regulatory Straitjacket

Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, governing autonomy in weapon systems, created a senior review process so structurally burdensome that despite eleven years of existence, not a single weapon system has completed it. The directive requires “comprehensive testing, reviews, and human oversight for autonomous weapons development and operation.” Each requirement adds time. Each review adds stakeholders. Each stakeholder adds concerns.

The result is a regulatory architecture that functions less as quality control than as deployment prevention. Systems that might operate autonomously in combat must demonstrate levels of reliability and predictability that autonomous systems, by definition, cannot guarantee. The directive defines autonomous weapons through cascading negations—“not fully automated,” “not without human judgment,” “not uncontrolled”—creating a regulatory object that exists only as absence.

China faces no equivalent constraint. The 2024 China Military Power Report notes that “the PLA is rapidly pursuing ‘intelligentized warfare,’ integrating AI, big data, and autonomy across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.” Chinese definitions of autonomous systems use positive specifications—what systems can do—rather than American negative definitions—what systems must not do without approval.

The asymmetry matters operationally. American autonomous systems require human approval for engagement decisions. Chinese systems may not. In a conflict measured in seconds, the approval requirement becomes a tactical disadvantage. In a conflict measured in years, the regulatory burden becomes a strategic one.

CENTCOM’s task forces can accelerate procurement. They cannot accelerate the policy reviews that determine what autonomous systems may legally do. The sixty-day delivery promise applies to hardware. The autonomy approval process operates on its own timeline.

The Industrial Base That Isn’t

The United States lost not just manufacturing capacity but the capacity to create manufacturing capacity. Machine tools build other machines. They are the seed corn of industrial mobilization. The World War II conversion miracle—peacetime factories transformed into weapons plants within months—depended on a machine tool industry that no longer exists at scale.

Defense consolidation in the 1990s reduced fifty-plus prime contractors to five major firms. The mergers created efficiency through vertical integration. They also activated lock-in mechanisms that make pivoting to new business models structurally impossible without destroying the firms themselves. The primes are optimized for cost-plus contracts with schedule extensions. Time-indexed incentives that reward early delivery threaten their fundamental revenue architecture.

Private equity encroachment into the defense sector compounds the problem. PE ownership creates opacity that even the SEC cannot penetrate. It also creates incentive structures oriented toward quarterly returns rather than decade-long capability development. The combination produces a double veto: capital can refuse to invest, and when it does invest, it operates through financial structures that prioritize extraction over production.

The startup ecosystem that might provide alternatives faces its own constraints. The Defense Innovation Unit can identify promising technologies. It cannot provide the capital or supply chain integration required for production at scale. University spinoffs require legacy industrial networks for actual manufacturing. The innovation theater—demonstrations, prototypes, pitch competitions—substitutes for the industrial capacity it cannot create.

What Victory Would Require

Matching Chinese drone production would require transformations that no current policy contemplates.

First, supply chain sovereignty. Not the theater of “American-made” labels on products assembled from Chinese components, but actual domestic production of batteries, motors, sensors, and control systems. China’s export restrictions extend beyond materials to technology, equipment, and expertise transfer. Even if Western nations develop alternative mining sources, they cannot develop processing capability without Chinese knowledge transfer—which China has no incentive to provide.

Second, regulatory reform. Not the incremental adjustments of task force authorities, but fundamental revision of DoDD 3000.09 and the approval processes it mandates. This would require accepting risks that American military culture currently rejects: autonomous systems that make mistakes, that kill the wrong targets, that fail in ways that generate headlines.

Third, industrial policy. Not the subsidies and tax incentives that current legislation provides, but direct state investment in manufacturing capacity of the kind that created the arsenal of democracy. This would require accepting government involvement in private industry that American political culture currently rejects.

Fourth, doctrinal transformation. Not the addition of drone squadrons to existing force structures, but the replacement of exquisite platforms with expendable ones. This would require accepting casualty ratios—of equipment, if not personnel—that American military culture currently rejects.

Each transformation is theoretically possible. None is politically probable. The gap between what scaling requires and what American institutions can deliver is not a matter of will. It is a matter of structure.

The Honest Assessment

CENTCOM’s task forces represent the best the current system can produce. They move faster than traditional acquisition. They leverage commercial technology. They deploy operational units rather than study groups. Joy Shanaberger’s sixty-day promise reflects genuine urgency and genuine capability.

None of it is enough.

The honest assessment is this: the United States cannot match Chinese drone production through procurement reform. The industrial base does not exist. The supply chains are not sovereign. The regulatory architecture prevents rapid scaling of autonomous capabilities. The defense primes are optimized for different products. The political system cannot generate the industrial policy required for transformation.

What CENTCOM can do is develop asymmetric responses that do not require matching Chinese production. Counter-drone systems that impose costs on attackers. Electronic warfare capabilities that disable swarms. Defensive architectures that accept attrition. Offensive doctrines that maximize the impact of smaller numbers.

The task forces may deliver these capabilities. They will not deliver parity.

China’s mass production advantage is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be managed. The sooner American strategists accept this reality, the sooner they can develop responses appropriate to the actual correlation of forces rather than the one they wish existed.

The sixty-day promise is real. The transformation it implies is not.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What exactly is CENTCOM’s new drone task force? A: CENTCOM established two task forces in 2025: the Rapid Employment Joint Task Force (REJTF), which promises to deliver drone capabilities within sixty days, and Task Force Scorpion Strike (TFSS), which operates the military’s first one-way attack drone squadron in the Middle East. Both aim to accelerate drone deployment but face structural constraints on scaling.

Q: How large is China’s advantage in drone production? A: China produces roughly ten million drones annually across all segments, with 2024 output valued at $29.4 billion—at least four times U.S. spending. DJI alone controls over ninety percent of global consumer drone sales. The gap reflects different industrial ecosystems, not just different budgets.

Q: Can the U.S. catch up to China in drone manufacturing? A: Not through current approaches. Matching Chinese production would require domestic supply chain sovereignty, regulatory reform of autonomous weapons policy, massive industrial investment, and doctrinal changes accepting high attrition rates. None of these transformations appears politically probable in the near term.

Q: What is the Replicator initiative? A: Announced in 2023 by Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks, Replicator aimed to field “multiple thousands” of autonomous systems within eighteen to twenty-four months to counter China’s mass advantage. The initiative has produced prototypes but not the industrial transformation required for mass production.

The Trajectory Ahead

The next five years will clarify whether American strategy adapts to asymmetry or continues pursuing parity it cannot achieve. The signs point toward the latter. Budget documents emphasize production increases. Policy statements promise industrial revival. Task forces multiply.

Meanwhile, Chinese factories produce. Ten million units annually. Growing.

The gap is not closing. It is widening. And no sixty-day promise will change the underlying arithmetic. What matters now is whether American strategists can design around a disadvantage they cannot eliminate—or whether they will continue building administrative runways to summon industrial capacity that will not arrive.

The drones are a symptom. The disease is structural. And structure changes slowly, if it changes at all.

Sources & Further Reading

The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:

• Secretary of Defense Memorandum: Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance - Primary document establishing current Pentagon drone policy
• 2024 China Military Power Report - DoD assessment of PLA autonomous systems development
• Executive Order 14307: Unleashing American Drone Dominance - White House directive on drone supply chain security
• DoD Directive 3000.09 - Governing policy for autonomy in weapon systems
• Reuters: Conflict, drones, rare earths drive China supply chain dependence - Supply chain dependency analysis
• Atlantic Council: Iran drone production - Iranian UAV manufacturing and exports
• Arms Control Association: Pentagon autonomous weapons plans - Replicator initiative details
• China’s Rare Earth Dominance - Material supply chain analysis