The Trump administration has lost roughly one quarter of the country’s MQ-9 Reaper drones as part of the president’s ongoing war against Iran.
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.
A fourth U.S. official told the Post that not all of the Reapers were shot down—some of them crashed after the operators’ connection to the drone failed.
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.
In May, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Tabor told the Senate that the number of remaining drones had fallen to roughly 135, noting he was “concerned” about the losses.
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.
It’s been more than five months since Trump launched his military onslaught against Iran, and multiple reports have raised concerns that the United States is running out of weapons. Trump administration officials have denied the reports, even after they reportedly sent the president into a rage.
Despite insisting that the U.S. weapons stockpile is far from depleted, the Trump administration has launched a desperate campaign to boost weapons manufacturing.
Last week, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg gave industry leaders three weeks to submit their plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities.”
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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