For those unaware, there's been an ongoing debate between the US Air Force and the Pentagon. Ukraine wants military drones. The Air Force has a number of them they've deemed 'obsolete' (Reaper, essentially a renamed Predator-2). The AF wants to give them, the Pentagon does not, mostly around the technology transfer that would happen when a downed drone gets shipped to Russia (or Iran, or North Korea) for analysis. The AF has been emphasizing ob-so-lete, as current drones are much better. The Pentagon is stuck on tech transfer plus repercussions of them striking RF territory. Also, AFAIK US mil drones are somewhat reliant on US sat-comms for remote piloting, and I don’t expect the RF to be able to duplicate that.

My personal take is that the AF would also like to see how these drones do as ground support (they were originally designed for Afghanistan and Iraq where they were used as loitering weapons of assassination).

Now that Ukraine has taken the matter into its own hands, has been building their own drones capable of striking RF territory — and using them to do that — I have to wonder if this has unjammed the stalemate between the two US agencies. I’d also mention that reapers in the UAF armory would save a number of Ukranian lives. The RF has been building static defenses in the southern part of occupied Ukraine. Reapers would change the situation dramatically, turning trenches from something that would cost lives to capture into easy targets. I’d like to think that Ukrainians simply having these might cause the RF to decamp from those trenches (and if Ukraine gets as far as the shores of the Azov, it’s game-over for the RF southern front).

As a side note, I’d mention that a lot of the weaponry that’s gone from the US to Ukraine has been ‘obsolete’ in the sense that the US has better, storing these and eventually disposing of them was going to cost money, in spite of them counting as part of the money being spent to help Ukraine defend itself.