After nearly four years of fighting, few aspects of Russia’s war in Ukraine have gained as much attention among Western militaries as the rapid expansion of drone warfare. Since 2023, both sides have deployed millions of cheap quadcopter-type drones across the battlefield. In some parts of the front, these small drones now account for up to 70 percent of battlefield casualties. Meanwhile, Russia is using thousands of Geran-2 and Geran-3 propeller-powered one-way attack drones in almost nightly long-range strikes on Ukrainian cities, and Ukraine has been using a wide array of its own one-way attack drones for regular strikes on Russian bases, factories, and energy infrastructure.

Watching these developments, many Western defense strategists have made urgent calls to shift military priorities. In June, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to accelerate drone production. Since then, the U.S. Department of Defense has made several policy changes to facilitate the rapid integration of low-cost drones into the U.S. arsenal, and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called for the United States to establish “drone dominance.” In the private sector, meanwhile, software and AI companies that have bet heavily on developing uncrewed military technologies, such as Anduril, Palantir, and Shield AI, are racing to win lucrative new defense contracts. It is certainly the case that small uncrewed aircraft systems have fundamentally changed the way that infantry combat is fought, and that the U.S. Army and other parts of the force are behind on these capabilities—and, more concerning, on counter-UAS technologies—compared to Russian or Chinese forces.

But the assumption that large-scale acquisition of AI-enabled drones will strengthen U.S. defenses against China is misguided. For one thing, lessons from the war in Ukraine—an attritional, inconclusive struggle between two fundamentally land-centric armed forces—often do not apply directly to other kinds of conflicts. The realities of Beijing’s military arsenal and the likely nature of any potential confrontation in the Indo-Pacific mean that such a conflict would be decided by very different factors. Despite having the largest and most advanced drone industry in the world, China has actually been prioritizing crewed military hardware. Each year, the People’s Liberation Army receives eye-watering numbers of modern and highly capable combat aircraft, large warships, and cutting-edge ground-based, maritime, and air-launched missile systems. If the United States focuses too heavily on drone development and acquisition, it risks losing its slim remaining edge over the PLA in the high-end air force and navy capabilities that would dominate any Indo-Pacific conflict.

Over the past few years, military analysts and defense industry executives alike have focused on the lessons that Western militaries should supposedly take from Ukraine’s remarkable defense against Russia. One result of this interest has been an oversaturation of new defense products and technologies that are being marketed to Western militaries as “transformational,” based on vaguely described combat use in Ukraine. In fact, many such systems, especially Western-made drones from tech startup firms, have proved ineffective or even failed outright on the battlefield in the face of omnipresent Russian (and Ukrainian) electronic warfare and hard environmental conditions.

A larger problem, however, is that the war in Ukraine features many characteristics that would not apply to U.S. and Chinese forces in an Indo-Pacific context. Russia’s ongoing ground invasion of Ukraine has resulted in sparsely manned frontlines stretching more than 600 miles from Kharkiv Oblast in the north to Kherson in the south. Neither side has achieved air superiority, making airpower far less significant than in other modern conflicts. Since both Russian and Ukrainian armored formations and other elite units suffered catastrophic losses in the early phases of the war, neither side has been able to conduct large-scale combined-arms maneuver warfare since mid-2023. As a result, both armies have had to rely heavily on small infantry units with attached tank, artillery, and drone support to make probing attacks through minefields against fixed defensive lines. Progress is grindingly slow and costly in both directions.

Under these conditions, short-range, lightweight, cheap, and mass-produced quadcopter-type drones have proved highly effective. Especially as conventional artillery and long-range........

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