If you’ve been tracking some numbers coming out of the Pentagon recently, you’ll have seen a whole lot of zeroes.
Earlier this week, the Department of Defense/War (take your pick, we don’t judge) dropped a whopping $150B solicitation for the Missile Defense Agency’s Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) program, tapping over 1,000 “qualifying offerors” to bid for the Golden Dome-focused contracting vehicle.
The department doubled down on its big wish list by unveiling a $1B “Drone Dominance” program that promises to buy over 200,000 US-made one-way attack (OWA) drones by 2027, 30,000 of which they’re hoping to get their hands on by July 2026.
The North Pole defense-industrial base has its work cut out for it this year.
Drones and more drones: Let’s kick things off with the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program (DDP). The spending spree—the implementation of Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” memo from July—is split into four phases, which the department calls “gauntlets,” over two years.
- In the first “gauntlet,” the Pentagon will ask 12 vendors to “collectively produce 30,000 drones at a cost of $5,000 per unit, for a total of $150 million in department outlays.”
- Over the next three phases, the number of vendors will drop to five, drone orders will increase to 150,000, and drone unit costs will drop from $5,000 to $2,300.
- The DDP is funded through $1B from the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ which will finance the acquisition of “approximately 340,000 small UASs for combat units over the course of two years.”
“Each phase of the program begins with a Gauntlet challenge and ends with completed delivery of production-quality sUAS systems from winners of the Gauntlet event,” according to the DDP’s website. “All sUAS will be flown by military operators and evaluated on the ability of the sUAS to complete various mission scenarios. The highest scoring vendors will receive orders from the DoW.”
Flying high: The DDP has made more than a few people in the drone biz pretty happy.
“This will help companies go to private equity, go to the venture capital community, and go to private investors and raise money to help scale manufacturing to be able to meet the demand that now exists for the warfighter,” Michael Robbins, CEO of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems (AUVSI), the industry’s advocacy group, told Tectonic. “We just haven’t had that demand. [There were] 4,000 drones purchased across all DoW last year, that’s a wild number, but now we’re talking about real scale.”
Building up: This surge in demand—and the expansion of industrial capacity that’s needed to meet it—could come with some growing pains, but Robbins feels good about the industry’s ability to deliver.
“The industry has already been investing in industrial base capacity, building up more resilient supply chains, and enhancing its manufacturing capability,” he said. “There’s about a quarter of a million square feet of drone manufacturing construction underway right now, and that’s without any demand signal.”
“Companies are already investing, recognizing that drones are a significant piece of the future of warfare, and they’re betting on themselves, their investors are betting on them, and they’re already starting to scale their manufacturing and their workforce,” he added.
Like any competition, not everyone will be a winner (sad, we know), but companies that don’t get selected in the first gauntlet will be able to compete for successive ones.
This also won’t be the only procurement pathway for drone-makers. “There’s another billion for small UAS in the [NDAA], which we hope will pass this year, that will be less of a gauntlet and more of a traditional acquisition style, because that’s through the appropriations process, as opposed to reconciliation,” Robbins said.
“There’s always going to be winners and losers, but that’s the whole reason for doing competition. That’s a good thing,” he added. “Competition promotes innovation, and it drives down costs, but the demand signal is clearly there, and it’s only going to accelerate.”