Army cuts helicopters, pushes ‘Amazon for war’ as drone combat reshapes military

Army leaders signaled Wednesday that drone-heavy warfare and recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are reshaping the service’s aviation and missile defense strategy, driving new scrutiny of helicopter programs and costly Patriot interceptor systems.

The comments come as the Army’s fiscal year 2027 budget request sharply cuts the funding request for helicopter procurement, including reducing Apache funding from roughly $361.7 million to about $1.5 million, Black Hawk funding from about $913 million to roughly $39.3 million and Chinook procurement from roughly $629 million to about $210 million, while increasing investment in drones, autonomy and low-cost battlefield technologies.

The transformation push already is extending beyond procurement. The Army previously announced plans to cut roughly 6,500 active-duty aviation positions over fiscal years 2026 and 2027 — including pilots, flight crews and maintainers — as leaders shift resources toward unmanned systems and drone warfare.

It remains unclear whether the procurement reductions ultimately will shrink aviation fleet sizes, extend the service life of aging aircraft or delay planned replacement cycles.

Army leaders suggested the battlefield lessons driving the changes already are shaping budget decisions, as the service redirects money away from some traditional aviation programs toward drones, autonomy and low-cost mass systems.

“Absolutely, as we look across the aviation portfolio … we’re re-looking that,” Assistant Army Secretary Brent Ingraham said during a Pentagon media roundtable Wednesday. 

Ingraham said the Army is reassessing how traditional manned aircraft fit alongside larger unmanned systems increasingly capable of missions once handled by helicopters.

The proposed aviation cuts already have drawn concern on Capitol Hill. 

During a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing May 12, Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., warned that the Army’s budget request included “zero H-64 Apaches, zero Chinook Block IIs, and one UH-60 Black Hawk,” arguing the service was divesting critical capabilities before validating replacements.

“Your department’s budget request cuts over $5 billion from the industrial base in the aviation sector alone, effectively shutting down all current Army aviation platforms,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, pressed War Secretary Pete Hegseth during a May 12 House Appropriations hearing. “How did the department arrive at the conclusion that reducing procurement for these Army aviation platforms strengthens rather than weakens the aviation industrial base?”

 Hegseth acknowledged the Pentagon was reconsidering parts of the plan.

“There are some very good things in the Army Transformation Initiative, and there are some things that we’ve needed to get another look at,” Hegseth told lawmakers during a House hearing after facing questions about the scale of the aviation cuts.

Hegseth said Pentagon leaders were focused on ensuring the Army does not create “aviation capability gaps” as it transitions toward more unmanned systems and next-generation technologies.

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Army leaders said the rapid spread of cheap drones is forcing the Army to rethink how it buys and fields aircraft, missile defenses and battlefield technology.

“We know we don’t want to continue to use a Patriot missile to shoot down a cheap drone,” Ingraham said. “You’ve got to get on the right side of the cost curve.”

The concern has become increasingly urgent after the U.S. and its allies burned through large numbers of expensive missile defense interceptors during the Israel-Iran conflict and broader Middle East operations, fueling Pentagon concerns about stockpile depletion and the long-term sustainability of relying on multimillion-dollar defensive systems against cheap drones and missiles. 

Officials also described a new allied drone and counter-drone procurement marketplace designed to speed foreign military sales and standardize interoperable systems across partner nations. Driscoll compared the effort to “an Amazon for war.”

Officials said the marketplace is expected to become available to roughly 25 U.S. allies and partners worldwide, initially focused on drone and counter-drone systems before potentially expanding to additional capabilities and countries.

The platform will for now only allow allies to buy U.S. capabilities. 

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The Army also is launching a rapid competition to develop low-cost interceptors designed to counter drones and cruise missiles without exhausting multimillion-dollar Patriot missile stocks.

Ingraham said companies will have roughly 120 days after an upcoming industry event to demonstrate technologies ranging from rocket motors and seekers to fully integrated interceptor concepts.

“Even if you don’t have it all on the ground … bring it,” he said.

The transformation effort reflects growing concern inside the Pentagon that cheap drones, autonomous systems and mass-produced weapons are rapidly changing the economics and survivability assumptions of modern warfare, particularly after conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East exposed vulnerabilities in traditional armored and aviation-heavy battlefield concepts.

Army leaders increasingly suggest future wars will rely less on small numbers of expensive manned platforms and more on large quantities of cheaper, networked and rapidly replaceable systems capable of surviving in drone-saturated battlefields.

Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said at the roundtable that the service is attempting to overhaul what leaders view as decades of broken acquisition practices that left the Army too slow to adapt to rapidly changing battlefield conditions.

“How do we dig down deep into the system to change the broken processes that have led to so many bad outcomes over the last 30 years?” Driscoll said.

Driscoll said the Army had lost Congress’s trust after decades of acquisition failures and budget overruns.

“The United States Army had in some ways lost Congress’s trust over the last 30 years that we could do big new projects, keep them on time, keep them on budget,” he said.

He later referenced the Army’s now-canceled M10 Booker armored vehicle program as an example of the type of procurement failure leaders are trying to avoid.

“When we go to Congress and say, ‘Hey, trust us to develop a new platform. This one will not turn out like the Booker tank,’” Driscoll said.

Driscoll argued the Army already is trying to field new capabilities on dramatically accelerated timelines more similar to wartime adaptation cycles seen in Ukraine than traditional Pentagon acquisition schedules.

“When Operation Epic Fury kicked off, we were able to on day five go start the process to purchase 13,000 Merops counter-drone interceptors,” Driscoll said.

“By day 10, we had contracted for something we had never purchased before,” he added. “They were starting to flow into theater in the thousands by day 20.”

Army officials also said the service is trying to rapidly improve how weapons systems, sensors and battlefield networks communicate with one another after studying Ukraine’s ability to quickly integrate commercial and military technologies during the war.

“The Ukrainians were highlighting to us how their open architecture system allowed information to pass between nearly all of their sensors and radars,” Driscoll said. “That empowered so many things that they could do that we just can’t do yet.”

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“At this exact moment at Fort Carson, there are 450 developers and programmers jailbreaking all of our equipment,” he added.

“I’m cautiously optimistic within a month from now we will have jailbroken literally hundreds of pieces of equipment.”