U.S. Accelerates Low-Cost Attack Drone Program to Field Combat Systems by 2027.

The U.S. Department of War, on February 6, 2026, selected 25 companies to compete in a fast-moving evaluation aimed at fielding inexpensive, weaponized small drones across combat units by 2027. The effort matters because it signals a shift toward industrial-scale production of attritable strike drones, reshaping how U.S. forces generate mass and precision in future conflicts.

The U.S. Department of War set a hard tempo on February 6, 2026, turning “drone dominance” from a talking point into a near-term fielding plan by selecting 25 vendors for an initial competitive evaluation aimed at pushing inexpensive, weaponized small drones into combat units by 2027. The program’s opening event, branded the “Gauntlet,” starts February 18 at Fort Benning, Georgia, where companies will deliver prototypes and train soldiers on their use before stepping aside. Military operators will then run mission scenarios that culminate in a find, lock-on, and destroy sequence against representative targets, putting real battlefield handling ahead of marketing claims.
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U.S. "Drone Dominance" Gauntlet trials at Fort Benning pit 25 vendors' low-cost one-way attack drones against realistic targets, aiming to rapidly field mass, jam-resilient precision strike capability across frontline units by 2027 (Picture source: U.S. Army).

The War Department describes Drone Dominance as a four-phase, $1.1 billion demand signal built around iterative competitions measured in months, not years, executed by the Defense Innovation Unit alongside the Test Resource Management Center and Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane. Phase I runs through early March, when roughly $150 million in prototype delivery orders are expected, followed by a compressed five-month delivery window. The explicit aim is to industrialize attritable strike drones the way the U.S. once industrialized artillery shells: repeatable, scalable, and budgetable.

The program’s center of gravity is the low-cost one-way attack drone, an expendable system that sits between a hand grenade and a cruise missile in both price and tactical effect. In practical terms, that points to two dominant design families. The first is the FPV-style multirotor, optimized for short-range precision strikes, urban penetration, and trench-line lethality, usually man-in-the-loop and resilient to imperfect GPS. The second is the small fixed-wing or hybrid loitering munition, trading some terminal agility for longer reach, higher speed, and more forgiving logistics for company-level stocks. The Gauntlet’s operator-flown evaluation model is a quiet admission that the decisive variable is not brochure performance but how quickly a squad can learn the system, survive enemy jamming, and still put an explosive effect precisely where it matters.

The vendor roster hints at what the Pentagon expects to buy. Firestorm Labs has publicly showcased Tempest, a modular Group 2/3 aircraft concept with a reconfigurable airframe and a reported 10 lb payload and up to six hours endurance in some configurations, the kind of baseline that can swing from ISR relay to light strike depending on propulsion and warhead module choices. Ascent AeroSystems brings a very different logic: its Spirit coaxial UAV emphasizes ruggedness and modular payload stacking, with published figures including up to 13.5 lb maximum takeoff weight, significant payload margin, and speeds above 60 mph, a profile consistent with a tactical screwdriver airframe that can be repurposed into a strike drone by swapping sensors for a small warhead and prioritizing survivability in poor weather and rough handling.

Other selections point to a layered architecture rather than a single winner drone. Teal Drones’ published Teal 2 specifications highlight a 30+ minute class system with strong encryption and a control range on the order of kilometers, typically an ISR tool but also a natural spotter and battle damage assessment companion to one-way attack drones. Auterion’s Skynode X, positioned as an integrated autopilot and mission computer, suggests a Pentagon preference for common software backbones that can be ported across airframes, accelerating autonomy features like assisted navigation, computer vision cueing, and fleet-level telemetry. XTEND, meanwhile, openly markets AI-assisted human-guided tactical drone systems and has described platforms including a micro-tactical ISR drone for GPS-denied spaces and even a kinetic counter-drone interceptor concept, a reminder that the same low-cost ecosystem can produce both attackers and defenders. DZYNE’s prominence in handheld counter-UAS systems such as Dronebuster, including electronic attack options like GNSS spoofing, reinforces that any mass-fielding of small attack drones has to be paired with organic protection against enemy swarms and FPV raids.

For operations, a platoon that once relied on mortars, rockets, or scarce air support gains a shelf of precision effects with near-instant responsiveness. One-way attack drones compress the kill chain from minutes to seconds, especially in cluttered terrain where line-of-sight observers can guide a munition around cover, into apertures, or onto the thin top armor of vehicles. In peer-fight conditions, their value rises further as a cost-exchange weapon. They can saturate air defenses, force radars to reveal, drain interceptor magazines, and still deliver effects on artillery positions, logistics nodes, and command posts. The Gauntlet’s insistence on soldier training and operator execution is also about cognitive load. If the control interface is clumsy or the drone is maintenance-heavy, it will die on the shelf, not the battlefield.

Drone Dominance reads as Washington’s attempt to close a credibility gap exposed by Ukraine’s drone-centric battlefield. The inclusion of Ukrainian firms, including General Cherry Corp, which has been publicly linked to front-line drone development and a fast interceptor concept, signals a willingness to import combat learning at industrial speed, not after the next program objective memorandum cycle. At the same time, the War Department is trying to build a durable U.S. manufacturing base for attritable systems, so services can buy the quantity they want and at a price they want through normal budgeting once the initial surge forces costs down and supply chains harden.

The hard part will not be ordering 30,000 drones, but it will be standardizing munitions safety, deconflicting friendly airspace at scale, hardening datalinks against electronic warfare, and ensuring that low cost does not become low trust in GPS-denied, jammed, and spoofed environments. If the Pentagon can solve those frictions while keeping the cycle time tight, Drone Dominance could do for small-unit lethality what precision-guided munitions did for airpower decades ago: make mass and precision coexist, and make the tactical edge cheap enough to be everywhere.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.