Serve content from centralized location

On your master site, register a new XML RPC method that accepts a date argument and replies back with all content published since then.

For each of your drone sites, register a cron hook that pings the master every X minutes/hours with the date of the most recently “imported” content, and then saves the response locally.

W3 Total Cache (and the like) are front-end cache systems for serving up content to your users. In this context, caching is referring to storing content on the drone site for a period of time, and then updating at regular intervals, as opposed to pinging the master on every front-end request.