The Pentagon is racing to deploy thousands of autonomous drones and unmanned vessels, but a critical problem threatens the entire effort: nobody has figured out how to keep them supplied in the field. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) warns that the military's focus on building autonomous systems has outpaced its ability to sustain them, potentially turning an arsenal of cutting-edge technology into a collection of expensive prototypes.

The challenge isn't new. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a single MQ-9 drone required over 180 people to keep it running, including pilots, sensor operators, launch-and-recovery crews, and analysts. The term "unmanned aircraft" became a joke among military officers because the systems demanded more human support than the crewed platforms they were meant to replace.

What's Driving the Pentagon's Push Toward Autonomous Systems?

The U.S. Department of Defense is doubling down on autonomy anyway, and for good reason. In 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks unveiled Replicator, a Pentagon initiative to field "multiple thousands" of attritable autonomous systems across all domains. By 2027, the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) is requesting $54 billion in funding, a 240-fold increase from the previous year. That's more than the entire budget for the Marine Corps.

The logic is straightforward: autonomous systems reduce risk to personnel and missions by replacing large, vulnerable targets with distributed, expendable platforms that lean teams can oversee. But this model assumes something the military has never actually built: infrastructure designed for machines rather than people.

Why Is Sustainment the Real Bottleneck?

Here's where the problem becomes clear. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has already documented that the Navy's autonomy plans don't account for the infrastructure required to support these systems. The Navy expects to spend roughly $4.3 billion to acquire 21 uncrewed surface and undersea vehicles, but that estimate omits other lifecycle costs.

The numbers are sobering. Sustainment accounts for 70% of a platform's lifecycle cost, and nearly half of sampled systems had costs that grew beyond initial expectations. Adding thousands of unmanned systems without a better support plan risks compounding a known problem. The GAO has already documented declining mission-capable rates due to shortages of spare parts, skilled maintainers, and aging infrastructure.

Consider a realistic scenario: a fleet of unmanned vessels and drones patrol the Western Pacific for weeks, building a live picture of the battlespace and striking targets. But then sustainment catches up. A vessel that outran a missile salvo must fall back hundreds of miles to refuel at a manned port, or a drone tracking a fast-moving submarine threat is forced to ditch because no recovery node is in range. When operations run at "machine speed," the Pentagon hasn't yet figured out how to support them at the same tempo.

There's also early evidence of market failure. In June 2025, the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) noted that Boeing, the incumbent vendor for the XLUUV undersea vehicle program, did not bid on follow-on operations and sustainment work at all. Both legacy defense contractors and newer startups struggle when support programs are unclear or underfunded, leading to what a16z calls "an arsenal of prototypes".

How Can the Military Build Infrastructure for Autonomous Sustainment?

The good news is that some building blocks already exist. DARPA's NOMARS program has demonstrated automated at-sea refueling and autonomous harbor operations with the USX-1 Defiant unmanned ship. Sea Hunter has crossed from San Diego to Hawaii and back without a crew, with only brief boardings from an escort vessel to check propulsion.

A16z outlines what a true autonomous sustainment architecture for Pacific operations would require:

• Hardened, Tiered Autonomous Ports and Airbases: A mesh of autonomous ports and airbases that enable unmanned systems to recover without personnel and survive during months of high-tempo conflict.
• Containerized "Base in a Box" Modules: Standardized ISO-container kits for power, weapons, storage, launch and recovery, and command-and-control that can be dropped into place and chained together as demand scales.
• Robotic Handling and Turnaround Infrastructure: Fixed and mobile systems for automated launch, recovery, and reload of drones, sized from small-craft racks up to ship-scale piers.
• Integrated Energy and Data Spine: Forward-deployable power and hardened communications and compute stacks at every node, giving each site the ability to sustain operations and host autonomy at the edge even when disconnected.

All of this depends on a digital nervous system that keeps the broader enterprise working. Commanders need fleet-wide telemetry and predictive maintenance so they always know the health and status of every platform. They also need powerful software that treats sustainment as a live optimization problem. Companies like Rune Technologies are leading this evolution in contested logistics.

Steps to Prevent Autonomous Systems From Becoming Expensive Paperweights

• Redesign Infrastructure First: Build ports, airbases, and logistics networks designed for autonomous systems before deploying thousands of drones. The USS Gerald R. Ford entered service in 2017, but nearly ten years later the Pacific still lacks the electrical infrastructure to dock it properly.
• Plan for Attritability: Ensure resupply is nearly frictionless. Attritability only matters if new systems can flow into theater and be turned around quickly. Without this, commanders will hoard "attritable" assets the same way they hoard everything else that's hard to replace.
• Learn From Past Failures: The Navy's previous attempts to reduce crew size through automation resulted in large increases to maintenance costs when automated systems failed. Oversight alone can't keep up with reality; the Pentagon must actively study what went wrong before scaling up.

The Indo-Pacific is vast, and the military cannot flood it with people to hand-carry fuel and ammunition the way it did in World War II. The Army's own work on "precision logistics" and autonomous resupply acknowledges this on land, and the point is even more compelling at sea.

A16z's core argument is simple but urgent: wars are won on logistics, and that's even more true for a war fought with autonomous systems. Congress and the Department of War are not starting from zero, and lawmakers are already scrutinizing the Navy's future plans. But oversight alone can't solve the problem. The military is watching in real time what it looks like when new technology outruns infrastructure, and the clock is ticking to fix it before the drone swarms arrive.