Bone animation & Vertex Array

Me and one of my friend where thinking about skeletal animation and how it could be mixed with vertex arrays… We came up to that problem: if we want a sigle mesh model then all of the vertices in the model would need to be “attached” to a bone… so if we want to use vertex arrays (single glDrawElements) we would need to pre-transform every vertices of the model relatively to their bone before calling glDrawElements… so for every different object that own the same model we would need to have a temporary list of vertices for transformations… Is there any other way to do that ? I may be wrong…