US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1 billion worth of Reapers

Releasing war drones has a cost

The heavy reliance on Reapers avoids putting more U.S. pilots at risk, but it has also led Iranian air defenses to shoot down dozens of hunter-killer drones. The US military had lost nearly 30 Reaper drones as of May 2026, some of which were destroyed on the ground by Iranian counterattacks, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. The Air Force acknowledged that these combat losses had reduced its Reaper fleet to about 135 drones.

The total bill to American taxpayers for the destroyed Reapers is around $1 billion, according to Bloomberg. A typical Reaper can cost $30 million per aircraft, but the Air Force has said a Reaper equipped with a full suite of sensors can cost up to $50 million.

This number of Reapers lost in combat has almost certainly increased since May, as the United States and Iran have continued to exchange airstrikes and drones despite so-called ceasefire periods and attempts at negotiations. On July 8, as hostilities recently resumed with new Iranian strikes on commercial ships triggering new U.S. military airstrikes, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed to have shot down another Reaper drone.

Defense company General Atomics stopped making Reaper drones for the U.S. military in 2025. But a General Atomics executive told Breaking Defense that the company was interested in the U.S. military’s latest drone contract offer and appeared to suggest it would provide a cheaper successor to the Reaper.

The Defense Innovation Unit’s advisory called for drones capable of carrying many different sensor and weapon payloads up to 2,800 pounds and flying within a combat radius of at least 2,300 nautical miles – or 8,000 nautical miles for a one-way strike mission – while performing the same missions that the MQ-9A Reaper drone currently performs for the U.S. Army. It plans the delivery of “20 mission-ready aircraft” by 2031.

It remains to be seen whether the U.S. military and businesses can realize this vision of deploying cheaper but capable strike drones. The Pentagon is asking for about $54 billion in its fiscal 2027 budget to spend on drones and autonomous warfare technologies — an amount that rivals Ukraine’s entire wartime military budget.

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