Royal Navy moves to buy U.S.-made Skydio X10D drones

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has opened a tender to buy Skydio X10D small drones, the American-made reconnaissance quadcopter already ordered by the thousands by the U.S. Army, with an estimated budget of £120,000 (about $160,700) excluding VAT, according to a notice on the Defence Sourcing Portal.

The tender was issued by Navy Commercial, the Royal Navy’s procurement office at Whale Island in Portsmouth, and published on Oct. 20 under the Procurement Act 2023. It does not say how many drones the ministry plans to buy or which unit will operate them. Delivery is listed for the South-East of England.

The contract is short. Bids are due by Nov. 19, the ministry expects to pick a supplier around Nov. 26, and the formal notice lists the contract as running from Nov. 30, 2026, to March 31, 2027, the end of the British government’s financial year. The listing on the Defence Sourcing Portal gives a slightly later start date of Dec. 10. The tender is open to any qualifying supplier, is marked as suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, and will be decided on price.

The X10D is a compact, rucksack-portable quadcopter built by Skydio in Hayward, California, for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It carries day and thermal cameras, uses onboard artificial intelligence to fly itself around obstacles, including in complete darkness, and can track a subject day or night. The drone can switch radio channels automatically to keep its link under jamming and is designed to hold its position without relying on GPS.

The X10D has been on the U.S. Department of War’s Blue UAS list of drones cleared for military use since May 2024. In March, the U.S. Army ordered more than 2,500 X10Ds for over $52 million, the largest single-vendor small drone order in Army history. Spain awarded a contract worth up to €18 million (about $18.7 million) for the drone in February 2025, and Norway followed with an initial tender worth 101 million Norwegian kroner (about $9.4 million) in July 2025.

The UK Ministry of Defence already has experience with Skydio. In May 2022, Defence Equipment and Support’s Future Capabilities Group awarded a contract worth about £3 million (about $3.8 million) for the company’s earlier X2D drone, delivered with British partner Marlborough Communications, after buying and testing 90 Skydio drones in 2020.