Drone Dominance | Travis Metz - DIU Acting Director

Travis Metz (0:00)

We actually have a very wide and obviously sophisticated drone industry here. I say wide because it's not deep. I'm sort of impressed by the quality of the entrepreneurs, the quality of the ideas that they have. If we're at war with the peer adversary, it's going to be terrifying how many of these things we put up in the air. It's not that we don't have people using this stuff and using it and understanding it, it's just not happening fast enough.

Jordan Schneider (0:22)

Travis Metz joins War Talk today. He was recently promoted to DIU's acting director after spending the past year running the Drone Dominance Program. Previously, he spent a career in PE and VSP, spending not too much time touching defense, but presumably had an interest in weapons of war ever since he named his high school crewboat, the Viking Death Barge. Travis, welcome to War Talk.

Travis Metz (0:49)

Thank you. The Viking Death Barge thing is a deep pool, so I'm impressed by your Google skills. That's awesome.

Jordan Schneider (0:59)

Co-hosting today, Brian Clark, Justin, say who you guys are.

Brian Clark (1:04)

We're going to introduce our hosts. I'm Brian Clark. I'm a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, and I'm a retired submariner, and I'm just glad to be here with you guys.

Justin McIntosh (1:13)

Hey, everybody, Justin McIntosh, 20-year retired Grim Beret, served in first and fifth group, and now I currently work in defense tech and write a Substack blog that is read by tens of people.

It's called Mind of Things. So just, so you're coming from Drone Dominance. I think that's probably become one of the biggest, you know, points of reference that DIU can make for kind of how they're thinking about acquisitions in the future and how they're thinking about experimentation in the future. Can you kind of talk us through just, you know, big picture, the genesis of it, and then how it got from, you know, concept to first trial, second trial, now we're in phase three, like what that actually looks like.

Travis Metz (1:55)

Yeah, I'd love to. So just by way of background on me, I don't have any military experience. I was an Army brat. My dad was in the Army during Vietnam. Actually, two of my boys, one was in the Army, one is in the Army. So I've got sort of Army blood. No background in the military myself and not in the Department of War before last summer. I came down from Boston to work with a local colleague named Owen West, who had been in the prior Department of War under Trump 45

Owen had been asked last summer by the secretary to help him think about what it was inside the Department of War that had gotten in the way of us fundamentally procuring, scaling, and fielding drones.

Owen went on effectively a research project, and I sat second chair with him on this, where we realized that it is not that there aren't myriads of efforts within the Department of War to buy robots, to buy autonomous systems, to figure out the new ways of using them, and to do the hard work around the doctrine and the TTPs and the Datum OPF. But rather, it was simply not happening fast enough at enough scale. And so I don't think that's a complicated observation. I also don't think it's a controversial one. So lots of smart people trying to do the thing, but just not going fast enough. And you can, I am not fundamental, you can argue about the root cause of that. Probably as simple to say, the Department of War is a big complicated place with lots of inertia. And it's difficult to react in relevant time frames to new things that we're seeing on the battlefield. But of course we do have this horrible battlefield in Ukraine and the Ukrainians in particular, but the Russians as well, have innovated at an absolutely blinding pace around the use of robots to kill each other. And even though we, the United States, will fight differently than the Ukrainians and the Russians do, almost no matter where we fight, because of our capabilities at much higher altitudes. Nonetheless, it seems obvious in staring at all the stuff that you need robots, you need unmanned systems, you need the doctrine and the force structure to use them at a much broader scale than we were getting to.

So the secretary wrote a memo, effectively a deregulatory memo called the Drone Memo last July. The reconciliation bill, the OBA, the One Big Beautiful Bill, provided money for lots of things. But one of the things it was particularly focused on was scaling the US supply chains around small UAS, so small unmanned aerial systems.