Three U.S. officials told The Washington Post Thursday that the U.S. military had lost at least 45 Reaper drones. Each low-flying surveillance and attack drone costs between $30 million and $50 million to produce, depending on what type of sensor each machine carries, placing the potential total cost of the missing or destroyed Reapers at up to $1.3 billion.
At the beginning of the war, there were approximately 185 Reapers in the U.S. military fleet, including 165 in the Air Force and 20 in the Marine Corps. Marines spokesperson Lt. Col. Joshua Benson said that none of the Marines’ Reaper drones had been lost.
Reaper drones join the growing list of weapons that the U.S. is shedding faster than they can replace. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published in May estimated it will take until at least 2030 to restore the U.S. missile stockpile to pre-war levels, leaving a multi-year “window of vulnerability” for the United States in potential future conflicts. Since that study was published, the United States has only continued to execute military strikes, and Trump’s war against Iran has racked up a total estimated bill of more than $100 billion.
Despite insisting that the U.S. weapons stockpile is far from depleted, the Trump administration has launched a desperate campaign to boost weapons manufacturing.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the department was actively focused on boosting munitions acquisitions to provide “the weapons our warfighters need at the pace the threat demands,” but he claimed the effort predated Trump’s seemingly endless war.
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