A Crazy Expensive U.S. Drone Disappeared Over Strait Of Hormuz

A U.S. Navy MQ-4C, an airline-sized drone, just disappeared off Iran.

Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni

A U.S. Navy MQ-4C Triton reconnaissance drone on patrol in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday turned toward Iran, emitted an automated “code 7700” alert — a general signal used for any aircraft in distress — and fell rapidly from 52,000 feet. When it dropped below 10,000 feet the signal from its transponder was lost.

The event was tracked on open-source flight tracker FlightRadar. There has not yet been official confirmation whether the drone crashed, was shot down by an Iranian missile, or whether it somehow recovered and made it back to base.

The Triton is a big drone, with a larger wingspan than a Boeing 737 airliner. It is also expensive. The loss should raise question about how it got so costly and whether this role needs such pricey drones.

An Overgrown, Overpriced Sidekick?

The MQ-4C Triton, otherwise known as Broad Area Maritime Surveillance or BAMS, was originally envisaged as a lower-cost sidekick for crewed platforms, a way of covering large areas of ocean using fewer resources.

The Navy’s P-8 Poseidon aircraft is its premier asset for anti-surface and anti-submarine warfare. Made by Boeing, the Poseidon is also 737-sized, with a flight crew of two plus a team of seven to manage the sensors and other mission equipment on 10-hour flights. The P-8 covers vast swathes of ocean tracking surface vessels and submarines. It can carry Harpoon missiles, mines and torpedoes, and drop sonobuoys.

The Navy has a fleet of 128 P-8s, acquired at a so-called flyaway-cost of $171 million each. This is the marginal cost of producing a single unit of aircraft that is ready to fly, sometimes described as the sticker price of the aircraft itself minus operating, support and a share of R&D costs.

Drone technology offered to stretch out the Poseidon fleet’s capability by adding lower-cost, uncrewed assistants to make up numbers.

The MQ-4C Triton, and evolution of the Air Force’s, RQ-4C Global Hawk has a flight endurance of 30 hours and can cover 2 million square miles in a single flight with its radar, the AN/ZPY-3 Multi-Function Active Sensor.

The story of how the Triton came to be so expensive unfolds in U.S. Navy budget contracts line-by-line at yearly intervals.

The first few aircraft of any type tend to be expensive as glitches are resolved, and the first three MQ-4Cs bought in 2016 came in at $122 million apiece fly-away cost. This was supposed to drop in subsequent years.

It did not work out like that. The Navy’s 2018 budget included another three MQ-4C at an increased flyaway cost of $134 million. Again the plan was that by 2020 that cost would be down by 10%.

By the 2020 budget, the actual flyaway cost had not decreased. It had risen to an impressive $146 million. Despite this the planners had become even more optimistic about future costs, with the planned 2024 budget showing the future flyaway cost would be 20% less.

By the actual 2024 budget the flyaway cost had – not too surprisingly – gone up even more, to a staggering $187 million per aircraft — making the sidekick more expensive than the P-8 Poseidon it was supposed to help.

The Axe Falls On Triton

The price hikes did not go unnoticed and the Navy bailed out. The 2024 budget stated that “MQ-4C Triton inventory requirement has been re-assessed by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC)…. This reduction established a new total Program of Record (POR) UA quantity from 70 to 27.”

In other words, the Navy slashed the planned fleet by 60% and cut its losses before the Tritons got even more expensive.

The reduction meant reducing Triton operations down to just three orbits: Each orbit includes one aircraft in the air, another getting ready to take over, a third aircraft being prepared, and a fourth as a spare. The remaining MQ-4Cs are used for training, maintenance and as replacements when aircraft are lost.

Again, the fly-away cost is not the total price. By 2024 the gross cost was shown as $243 million for each MQ-4C. Total procurement cost for the set was around $5 billion.

This does not include the R&D costs. Unfortunately the R&D cost had also run way over budget and came to to $6.6 billion. That puts the total cost of the program at somewhere over $11 billion. And of course the fewer aircraft that are procured, the greater the R&D cost per aircraft.

So while the sticker price may have been $187 million, over the course of the whole production run, the Tritons ended up costing Uncle Sam over $400 million each.

To put it another way, instead of buying 27 cheap Triton MQ-4Cs, the Navy could have had another 60 expensive P-8 Poseidons. In doing so they would also have avoided the additional expense and complexity of introducing and operating a new type of aircraft.

Tp put it yet another way that one Triton probably cost as much as the two MC-130s which were abandoned and blow up. after the recent rescue mission in Iran.

More Billions For Drones?

This is just one of many examples where the Pentagon’s plans for a low-cost drone program ended up costing more than anyone except an experienced cynical observer would have guessed. In some cases the drones actually end up costing more than their weight in gold.

This is stark contrast to the civilian world, where drones cost progressively less year-by-year for the same capability. DJI’s current Neo 2 provides vastly better performance that its original 2013 Phantom at about one-sixth the cost. Of course DJI has the advantage of economies of scale and leveraging commercial technology, whereas drone like the Triton are made in tiny numbers and everything is made bespoke and to the highest possible standard.

The Pentagon has great plans for Drone Dominance, and the forthcoming budget will likely have tens of billions of dollars earmarked for drone acquisition and related efforts.

The U.S. might go the way of Ukraine, which acquires literally millions of small drones at less than a few thousand dollars each. Or it might go down the traditional acquisition route. The Pentagon’s Replicator project, a 2023 initiative intended to produce large numbers of drones at low cost rapidly in imitation of Ukraine, acquired existing SwitchBlade 600 drones at something over $70,000 a time. These are individually more capable than Ukrainian drones, but cannot make up for the tiny numbers.

The great thing about drones is that, unlike crewed aircraft, they are entirely expendable. They can be sent into danger zones like Hormuz without risking a single casualty. But when there are too few of them to do the job, and every accident or enemy missile means a $200 million+ loss, the drone effort needs radical overhaul.

UPDATE APRIL 15th The U.S.Navy Safety Command has finally confirmed the loss of an MQ-4C on April 9th, but has given no details. The location is withheld for security reasons.