The Pentagon has acknowledged that the United States currently lags far behind Ukraine in drone production. Ukraine is expected to manufacture between 6 million and 7 million small first-person-view, or FPV, attack drones this year, roughly 500,000 each month, Travis Metz, the Pentagon official leading its Drone Dominance program, told Reuters.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. By comparison, the Pentagon expects to have ordered slightly fewer than 200,000 drones through the program by February. Metz, deputy director and chief operating officer of the Defense Innovation Unit, acknowledged that US production remained only a fraction of Ukraine’s output. He described the effort to establish a large domestic drone industry as being in its earliest and most difficult stage. Building the initial capacity to manufacture 200,000 drones is more difficult than expanding production once factories, suppliers and trained workers are already in place, Metz said. Ukraine’s lead reflects more than four years of intensive development under battlefield conditions. Ukrainian manufacturers have had to produce inexpensive drones in large numbers while continually adapting them to Russian electronic warfare, interception systems and changes in frontline tactics. The Pentagon is now seeking to turn that experience into American manufacturing capacity. Its Drone Dominance initiative is intended to expand the US supply of inexpensive military drones while developing a domestic industry capable of producing them at scale. However, the effort is complicated by tighter requirements governing where drone components are made.