Pentagon Places First Drone Dominance Orders, Awarding 30,000 One-Way Attack Drones to 11 Vendors After Inaugural Gauntlet Competition
The DOD orders 30,000 small attack drones at $5,000 each from 11 vendors — including a British company that topped the leaderboard — as the first phase of a $1 billion program to field 300,000 domestically produced combat drones by 2027.
Overview
The U.S. Department of Defense has placed its first orders under the Drone Dominance Program, awarding contracts for 30,000 small one-way attack drones to 11 vendors that survived the program’s inaugural competition, known as the Gauntlet. The orders, worth approximately $150 million at $5,000 per unit, mark the beginning of a four-phase initiative aiming to equip the U.S. military with more than 300,000 domestically produced combat drones by 2027, according to DefenseScoop.
The first deliveries are slated for 17 military units beginning in March 2026, with all 30,000 systems expected to arrive within five months.
The Gauntlet: How the Competition Worked
The Drone Dominance Program, established under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” memorandum issued in July 2025, uses a competitive procurement model designed to drive down costs through successive rounds. Twenty-five vendors were invited to compete in Phase I, which ran for two weeks at Fort Benning, Georgia, ending on March 2, according to Breaking Defense.
Approximately 100 military personnel from the Army, Marine Corps, and special operations units evaluated each vendor’s system across categories including long-distance strike, urban strike, and kinetic strike performance. Operators received only two hours of training per system before assessment — a deliberate constraint intended to measure battlefield practicality.
London-based Skycutter claimed the top spot with 99.3 points, roughly 12 points ahead of second-place Neros, according to DefenseScoop. The full list of the 11 vendors receiving delivery orders is: Skycutter, Neros, Napatree, ModalAI, Auterion, Ukrainian Defense Drones (UDD), Griffon Aerospace, Nokturnal AI, Halo Aeronautics, Ascent AeroSystems, and Farage Precision.
Notably, Ukrainian Defense Drones — one of several Ukrainian manufacturers invited to compete — earned a place among the winners. Multiple Ukrainian companies participated and committed to establishing U.S.-based manufacturing, as reported by DefenseScoop.
Driving Down the Cost of War
A central goal of the program is to close the cost gap between U.S. military drones and the low-cost systems that have reshaped battlefields in Ukraine, Iran, and elsewhere. Phase I drones cost $5,000 each, but the Pentagon aims to bring that figure below $2,000 per unit by the program’s conclusion — closer to the $500 to $1,500 range that Ukraine currently pays for comparable systems, according to Breaking Defense.
“We’re using actual purchases and the entrepreneurial spirit and capital of American industry to drive unit prices down,” Travis Metz, the Pentagon’s program manager for Drone Dominance, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, as reported by DefenseScoop.
Owen West, a senior advisor to the program, framed the urgency in stark terms: “Low-cost drones account for a staggering proportion of the casualties in Iran, Colombia, Israel, Thailand and Cambodia,” according to DefenseScoop.
What Comes Next
Three additional Gauntlet rounds are planned, each with escalating order volumes and increasingly demanding test conditions. Phase II, scheduled for August 2026, will introduce GPS denial, communications jamming, and electronic warfare scenarios — conditions that more closely mirror the contested environments where these drones would actually be deployed, according to Breaking Defense.
The Pentagon expects to order between 50,000 and 60,000 additional drones in Phase II, with the total program budget exceeding $1 billion across all four phases, as reported by DefenseScoop.
What We Don’t Know
Several questions remain unanswered. The Pentagon has not disclosed the specific allocation of orders among the 11 winning vendors or whether orders are weighted by leaderboard ranking. It is also unclear how the program will handle the transition from prototype deliveries to full-rate production, or how the domestically produced systems will perform once electronic warfare conditions are introduced in Phase II.
The presence of a British company at the top of the leaderboard and Ukrainian firms among the winners also raises questions about what “domestically produced” will mean in practice — whether these companies will manufacture entirely on U.S. soil or whether components may be sourced internationally.
Analysis
The Drone Dominance Program represents a significant shift in how the Pentagon acquires small drone systems. Rather than the traditional multi-year defense procurement cycle, the Gauntlet model compresses vendor selection into weeks and ties continued participation to demonstrated battlefield performance. The program acknowledges what conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have made impossible to ignore: cheap, expendable drones have become a defining weapon of modern warfare, and the U.S. military has been slow to adapt.
The involvement of Ukrainian manufacturers is particularly notable. Ukraine’s battlefield experience with first-person-view attack drones has given its defense industry practical expertise that few Western companies can match, and the program’s willingness to include foreign firms — provided they commit to U.S. manufacturing — suggests the Pentagon is prioritizing capability over strict domestic sourcing in the near term.