When U.S. special operations teams deploy with drones, they can fly them. What they often cannot do is fix them, update their software, or swap out sensors without permission from the companies that built them. That was the core frustration four top special operations commanders brought to Capitol Hill in May 2026, telling a Senate panel that manufacturer restrictions on proprietary technology are creating a dangerous lag between the pace of real-world threats and the military’s ability to respond with its own equipment.
Lieutenant General Michael E. Conley of Air Force Special Operations Command, Major General Peter D. Huntley of Marine Forces Special Operations Command, Rear Admiral Walter H. Allman III of Naval Special Warfare Command, and Lieutenant General Lawrence G. Ferguson of U.S. Army Special Operations Command all appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. Their collective message was blunt: buying drones is not the hard part. Turning them into flexible, battlefield-ready tools is, and the companies that make them hold the keys.
Operators who can’t touch their own tools
Conley, in his prepared testimony, described a problem that sounds almost absurd on its face: when mission-computer software needs a fix during a deployment, operators cannot push the update themselves. They wait for vendor-approved patches routed through contractor-controlled development cycles. In a fight where threats shift in hours, those timelines can stretch far longer.
Huntley put it more starkly in his own written statement. He told the subcommittee that special operations forces can acquire drones but struggle to adapt them into real military capability at scale. Commercial drones are cheap and widely available, but converting them into platforms that meet SOF requirements for encryption, targeting, and interoperability with classified networks demands access to underlying software and technical data that manufacturers routinely withhold. Without that access, Huntley warned, U.S. forces risk falling behind adversaries who can reconfigure cheaper, less restricted systems on the fly.
Ferguson’s testimony emphasized the growing role of unmanned and autonomous systems across Army special operations, highlighting the need for small teams to integrate aerial, ground, and maritime robots into complex missions. Allman addressed similar themes from the naval perspective. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona pressed both Allman and Conley on maritime unmanned systems and the cost and capabilities of the OA-1K, according to a transcript excerpt released by Kelly’s office.
A problem that runs far beyond drones
The frustrations these commanders described are not new to the Pentagon. A Government Accountability Office report, “Weapon System Sustainment: DOD Can Improve Planning and Management of Data Rights” (GAO-25-107468), catalogs what the oversight body calls “vendor lock” across some of the military’s most expensive programs. Among the examples: F-35 corrosion repairs that require contractor involvement because the military lacks the technical data to do the work itself, Virginia-class submarine maintenance schedules dictated by original equipment manufacturers, and Littoral Combat Ship spare parts controlled entirely by OEMs.
Those cases involve major weapons platforms, not the smaller drones that special operators typically carry. But the underlying dynamic is the same: intellectual property rules negotiated during procurement give manufacturers lasting control over how, when, and by whom military equipment can be maintained or modified. Some SOF programs use rapid acquisition authorities that differ from traditional major weapons contracts, which could change the calculus. Whether those authorities actually prevent the same vendor dependencies from taking hold is an open question the public record does not yet answer.
The battlefield comparison no one had to spell out
The commanders did not need to name Ukraine to make their point, but the comparison hovered over the hearing. Since 2022, Ukrainian forces have demonstrated a model of drone warfare built on speed and improvisation: commercial quadcopters modified with 3D-printed munition releases, firmware rewritten by volunteer engineers, and new electronic-warfare countermeasures deployed within days of a Russian adaptation. That cycle of rapid field modification is exactly what U.S. special operators say proprietary restrictions prevent them from replicating.
The gap is not about hardware budgets. The United States spends more on unmanned systems than any other country. It is about who controls the software and technical data after the purchase order is signed. A special operations team that cannot update drone software or swap a sensor package without waiting for a manufacturer’s field representative faces a tactical disadvantage against any adversary, state or non-state, that operates without those constraints.
What the public record does not yet show
The full verbatim transcript of the hearing’s question-and-answer session has not been publicly released. The available evidence consists of the four commanders’ prepared opening statements, hosted on the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing page, and the partial excerpt from Senator Kelly’s office. That means the specific back-and-forth on proprietary restrictions, including any commitments to legislative action or any manufacturer names raised by senators, cannot be independently confirmed from public documents.
It also remains unclear whether the commanders proposed detailed remedies or confined their testimony to describing the problem. Senators may have asked whether the services want Congress to mandate open architectures, require certain data rights in new contracts, or fund dedicated in-house software teams for SOF units. Without the full transcript or official video, the precise scope of what was discussed about potential fixes is incomplete.
Nor do public documents specify which drone models, manufacturers, or contract types are most problematic. The commanders made clear that proprietary barriers exist, but operational details about specific platforms or informal workarounds are unlikely to surface in open testimony.
What comes next for Congress and contractors
The testimony put a specific tension on the congressional record. For defense contractors, data rights reforms could open maintenance and modification work to competitors or to the military itself, cutting into the recurring revenue that proprietary support contracts generate. For operators, the stakes are measured in response time: how quickly a team can adapt its tools when the mission changes or the enemy does something unexpected.
The GAO has already recommended reforms to how the Defense Department plans for and manages technical data rights. Whether Congress acts on those recommendations, or whether the same vendor dependencies simply extend into the next generation of unmanned systems, is now a legislative question as much as a procurement one. Four of the military’s most operationally experienced commanders told a Senate subcommittee that the current arrangement is not working. The question is whether that testimony becomes a catalyst or just another entry in a long record of warnings.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
