Drone Dominance Program

The Drone Dominance Program is the US Department of War’s attempt to fix the problem the war in Ukraine exposed: that the American defence base builds exquisite, expensive drones slowly, while the fight increasingly turns on cheap ones built fast and in volume. Launched in 2025 to carry out a presidential executive order on drone dominance, the roughly $1.1 billion, two-year effort is designed to buy low-cost, US-made attack drones at scale and to widen the supplier base far beyond the traditional primes.

The structure is competition-to-procurement. Rather than write a single large contract, the programme runs phased evaluations — the Gauntlet II live-fly trials being the current down-select — and places orders with the companies whose systems perform, many of them young manufacturers rather than household names. Phase II splits demand into mission categories with fixed price caps: long-range strike systems around $4,500 a drone and close-quarters urban-assault platforms around $3,500, with the stated ambition of scaling from tens of thousands of units toward 150,000 per phase while pushing unit costs down from about $5,000 to roughly $3,000.

The programme is as much industrial policy as procurement. Its explicit goals are to rebuild a domestic small-drone manufacturing capacity that had largely migrated to China, to qualify NDAA-compliant supply chains, and to compress the path from prototype to fielded system. It sits alongside the Pentagon’s other mass-autonomy push, the Replicator Initiative , as part of a broader bet that quantity, low cost and a deep manufacturing base are themselves a form of deterrence.