George Matus, founder and CEO of Teal Drones says the U.S. can transform its military capability by becoming a leader in affordable combat drones for a tiny fraction of the defence budget.
The U.S. currently has nothing resembling the tens of thousands of consumer drones which Ukraine use for reconnaissance and directing artillery fire, nor the fleets of home-built FPV kamikazes decimating Russian armor. The nearest U.S. equivalents are costly and only issued in small numbers. But Matus says that changing gear would require just a modest investment.
“The price of a single F-35 fighter could transform the entire drone industrial base, getting us to the volumes that provide critical mass and drive costs down with capability up,” says Matus.
A Life In Drones
Matus is just 26 but has a longer history with drones than many, and a level of technical expertise that could be described as extreme. Matus built his first drone at 12, and soon graduated to innovative designs, some of which he patented. At 16 he founded a company to make his 70+ mph consumer quadcopter, the fastest on the market at that time.
Unfortunately for Matus, he was doing this at the worst possible time for a U.S. drone maker. This was the late when 2010s Chinese company DJI was growing fast and taking over the drone market, obliterating most of the competition on the way. American companies could not compete with DJI’s highly capable quadcopters built with Chinese labor, and one by one they folded or left the drone business.
“DJI still makes the lowest cost small drones in the world, and that comes down to their historical lead in terms of scale and resources,” says Matus.
Matus’ company Teal survived the DJI storm by shifting from the consumer sector to government business, and in 2021 became part of Red Cat Holdings. In the consumer electronics market, being slightly more expensive than the competition can be death, but with government buyers other factors – such security – trump price. The U.S. Army effectively banned the use of Chinese drones in 2017 on security grounds, creating a safe space for American drone makers.
In the military equipment is not mass produced using commercial components, but custom made to exact specifications. This means typical military small drones like those produced by AeroVironment Inc, such as the Army’s RQ-10 Raven, tend to be pricey. While consumer drones cost perhaps a thousand dollars, AeroVironment’s SwitchBlade 300 antipersonnel drone comes in at over $50,000 and it’s big brother the SwitchBlade 600 is around four times as much.
Last year, inspired by the tank-killing $400 FPV kamikazes flown by Ukrainian forces, the U.S. Army announced the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance or LASSO, a portable anti-tank drone. There is one big difference between LASSO and the Ukrainian version though: a close look at the Army’s budget documents reveals that a single LASSO drone will cost an eye-watering $200,747.
At that price, it is not surprising the Army is only buying 437 LASSOs in the whole 2025 fiscal year. Whereas Ukraine is making and using around 3,000 FPV kamikazes per day.
Building The Future
Matus respects the legacy drone suppliers, but has a very different vision.
“I’m a fan of AeroVironment. Much of our team has come from there and what AeroVironment has done is impressive,” says Matus. “But I see them as more of a traditional defense contractor and what they are building does not represent the future. I think the future is affordable, capable, scalable drones that don’t cost $200k+.”
Matus says that, as with DJI’s success in the consumer sector, the key is volume production. If drones can be made in large numbers, they can be produced at a cost closer to what we see in Ukraine. This does not require factories full of high-tech robots. Ukraine’s drone fleet is being built in small artisanal workshops and even at kitchen tables.
“You don’t necessarily need automation to reach high volume. What you need is a very easy-to-assemble product that’s designed with no silly or dumb requirements. Automation should always be the last step to scaling volume,” says Matus.
Unfortunately the current U.S. procurement process is locked into a pattern of low volumes and high prices. The military seem content with this, and it suit the existing vendors.
”It is going to take some sort of jackhammer to change that and move us towards the future,” says Matus.
The impetus for that jackhammer might be the war in Ukraine and that country’s rapid pivot to a force supplied with plentiful small, cheap drones.
“Ukraine has done an amazing job and they are so agile and innovative at what they’re doing. And companies around the world are following suit, “ says Matus. “Ukraine has opened a lot of people’s eyes, including a lot of good people in our government and military. Millions of dollars’ worth of drones are destroying billions of dollars of Russian hardware while also providing vital ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] . But as a whole the US government hasn’t yet adequately learned what to do based on the very obvious impacts of drones on warfare.”
Matus’ worry is that the U.S. military will face a repeat of the introduction of the machinegun, which the military establishment was slow to accept as a game-changer. In 1914 as the First World War started, major armies on both sides only fielded a handful of machineguns — just two per infantry battalion in the British Army — but still deployed thousands of cavalry, as the belief in the power of the mounted charge persisted. It took carnage on a massive scale to shift military thinking.
New Drones On The Block
Matus’ vision of a new type of warfare is embodied in a family of drones which the company recently introduced.
“What we’ve been developing has taken into account things we have learned from Ukraine — the need to operate without GPS, to be modular, to cope with EW [Electronic Warfare], plus other things I’m not able to talk about,” says Matus. “Our goal was to make a drone ‘family of systems’ unlike any other.”
The family consists of three types of drone. Matus says that all three can fit into a rucksack and together cost less than one SwitchBlade
“But they still represent full air support capability at the tactical edge,” says Matus.
The first is the current Teal 2 quadcopter, designed for reconnaissance but which can also deliver grenade-type munitions.
The Edge 130 Blue combines vertical takeoff and landing with the long endurance of a fixed-wing drone, offering a flight time of over two hours
The expendable Fangtm is an FPV kamikaze drone for surgical strike. The current iteration has a flight time of 10 minutes, but Matus says that they are likely to move towards something bigger.
“What we’re seeing in Ukraine is a trend towards large, 8–10-inch FPVs with multi-kilo payload support and up to 20-kilometer range, and that’s the sort of capability likely to define the modern battlefield,” says Matus.
While other makers require one operator per drone, Teal’s control system allows one operator to handle several at once.
“We currently have multi-vehicle control capability, and are working toward full swarming across the family of systems,“ says Matus.
So an operator might find a distant target with an Edge-130, send a Teal 2 in for a closer look to identify and precisely locate it, and then use a number of Fangs to finish it, all from the same control unit.
Matus stresses that development, especially in their field of smart software, is very much ongoing. He expects to see larger fleets of highly capable small drones with advanced onboard intelligence capable of far more impressive feats of autonomy.
“In many ways this is still Day One for drones. With AI and autonomy, we really ain’t seen nothing yet,” says Matus. “Their near future capabilities will be outstanding.”
These are the sort of possibilities promised by the new open-source SkyNode already deployed in Ukraine, produced by Auterion whose open-source software Teal use.
A Change In The Government
Matus says the U.S. will only get a modern drone force when the government takes a more aggressive approach towards adopting the technology. At present, companies like Teal make changes to adapt to the changing landscape much faster than the procurement process can approve them.
“Drones are changing the way that wars are fought. The technology is accelerating faster and faster, but the government’s ability to adopt that technology is not keeping pace,” says Matus. “Even today, elite groups like the Seal Teams may have no operational capability of small ISR or FPV drones.”
At present the U.S. military treats small drones as niche items and does not issue them at scale like Ukraine or Russia. Matus sees initiatives like the Pentagon’s Replicator program to introduce larger numbers of drones at low cost as positive, but they may not be going fast enough in the right direction. Replicator is already committed to buying expensive legacy Switchblade 600 drones.
A single F-35 fighter costs around $100m, and the Pentagon is buying thousands. For the price of one of those fighters, Matus says the U.S. could kickstart mass production of small drones at low cost. In the future in which the number and quality of drones in the air may be vastly more important than the number of boots on the ground. Developing the means to produce them will be key, and failure could be disastrous.
“Whatever country and economy can win that future battle, the other side will have no choice but to surrender, or send their cavalry downrange to face the ‘machine guns,’ “ says Matus.
