Drone Dominance: Pentagon to order 30,000 one-way drones in ‘next few days’

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is set to order 30,000 one-way attack drones “over the next few days” as it determines the first winners of its Drone Dominance initiative, a department official told lawmakers today.

Over the past two weeks, unmanned platforms from 25 drone companies have braved the “Gauntlet” where US military operators put one-way attack drones through their paces in a series of combat-readiness tests at Fort Benning, Ga., said Travis Metz, the Pentagon’s program manager for the Drone Dominance program.

“That competition ended last Sunday, and we will be announcing and placing orders with the winning vendors over the next few days,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “The winners will be given orders for a total of 30,000 small one-way attack drones, which will be delivered to military units over the next five months.”

The tests involved about 100 servicemembers — largely largely from the Army, Marine Corps or the special operations community — who evaluated the drones in simulated combat situations, such as sending a drone out 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) to hit a specific target, Metz said. Operators were only given two hours of training for each unmanned aerial system (UAS).

“Then separately, we asked all the military operators … to evaluate the performance of the drones based on whether or not they would take it to war,” he said. “And we are buying based on those criteria starting now.”

The Pentagon anticipates spending $5,000 per drone in phase one of the program, which for 30,000 drones would come to $150 million. However, it hopes to get prices down to $2,000 per unit over the lifetime of the effort, Metz said.

A second phase of testing will begin in August, and will involve “a full counter-UAS environment” that includes denial of GPS and communications capabilities and electronic warfare, as well as requirements that will reduce the cognitive load on operators, Metz said.

“We are not being prescriptive with the companies about how they solve those challenges, because we want the entrepreneurs, both that we’re bringing in from outside of the United States and the entrepreneurs in the US to innovate across those particular problems,” Metz said.

The Drone Dominance initiative follows a July 2025 memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth titled “Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance,” which called for every Army squad to be armed with small, one-way attack drones by the end of fiscal 2026. In February, the Pentagon announced the Gauntlet as part of the first phase of the Drone Dominance effort.

While lawmakers were largely complimentary of the Drone Dominance program, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., criticized the Pentagon for not more directly engaging with Ukrainian drone makers.

“You’re talking about six months as being expedited scheduling,” said Shaheen, who recently visited Ukrainian drone producers in Odesa, Ukraine. “What they were talking about in Ukraine was iterating those drones every two weeks because of warfare. I don’t know how we think we’re going to compete if we’re talking about an every six month schedule, and we’re looking at our adversaries who are iterating on a weekly basis.”

Metz responded that the several Ukrainian drone manufacturers participated in the competition and have committed to stand up manufacturing in the United States.

“A few of them are likely to get orders,” he said.