If you’re looking for something to cure your post-Super Bowl blues, the Department of Defense has you covered.
Last week, the Pentagon revealed the 25 vendors selected to face off in the first phase of the Drone Dominance Program (DDP), the department’s $1.1B initiative to buy up tons of low-cost UAVs for the Army, and we’re here to catch you up.
Droning on: As a refresher, the DDP is the implementation of Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” memo from July. The program 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.”
In the arena: The Pentagon’s holding the first Gauntlet event from Feb. 18 into March at Fort Benning in Georgia, where operators will test and assess the drones to help decide who’s taking a slice of that $150M pie.
Here’s who got the invite:
- Startups include Neros, Auterion, Firestorm, Dzyne, Vector, and Performance Drone Works (PDW), along with larger firms like Kratos and Red Cat’s Teal Drones.
- Notably, Ukrainian companies General Cherry and the creatively named Ukrainian Defense Drones Tech Corp were also invited to participate in the challenge.
The top-performing participants in the Gauntlet challenge will receive orders from the Pentagon for 1,000 or more units. Like any competition, not everyone will be a winner (sad, we know), but companies that don’t get selected in the first gauntlet will still be able to compete for successive ones.
“There’s always going to be winners and losers, but that’s the whole reason for doing competition. That’s a good thing,” Michael Robbins, CEO of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems (AUVSI), the industry’s advocacy group, told Tectonic last year. “Competition promotes innovation, and it drives down costs, but the demand signal is clearly there, and it’s only going to accelerate.”