Pentagon Picks 25 Drone Makers for $150M “Gauntlet” Competition

On February 3rd, The Pentagon announced a list of 25 drone vendors that will be competing against each other for a $150,000,000 contract opportunity, and the Department of War will push toward fielding hundreds of thousands of weaponized one-way attack drones by 2027.

The competition, nicknamed “The Gauntlet,” will take place at Fort Benning, Georgia, from February 18th to sometime in March. This competition will be a reflection of where the United States’ Counter-UAS (C-UAS) and UAS technology stands compared to the rest of the world, and the Pentagon will be watching closely.

After operators are done flying, and the systems have been evaluated, the Pentagon plans to move forward with 300,000 prototype delivery orders and a turnaround time of just a few months. The entire point of this program is to speed up the process of getting cheap FPV drones into US soldiers’ hands, getting them trained, and combat-ready.

“Phase One” Is a Competition to Find Out Whose Drone Is Most Lethal

Phase One, a.k.a. “The Gauntlet”, is a series of competitions where military drone operators will put drones from the 25 different companies against each other to figure out which ones actually hold up to their promises in the field.

The whole pitch behind Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s directive targeting US drone dominance is speed. The War Department’s press release frames Phase one as a push to acquire hundreds of thousands of new drones for the US Armed Forces.

“By 2027, the Department will be fielding hundreds of thousands of weaponized, one way attack drones ready for combat.”

The 25 Vendors

Below are the 25 vendors that will be present at the Phase One “Gauntlet” stage, which begins February 18th and ends in March.

A number of those names jump out immediately if you’ve been watching the C-UAS world at all in recent months. Personally, I think it’s great to at least see a Ukranian name pop up on that list, especially given the seemingly strained relations between the US and Ukraine in previous years.

Why the Pentagon Is Doing it This Way

The Pentagon is trying to solve two major problems at once with this contract:

1. Scale and cost: field a lot of drones that can be treated as expendable tools, not rare museum pieces.
2. Cycle time: shorten the gap between “combat lessons learned” and “ground units have the hardware in their hands.”

That theme is consistent with how Hegseth’s earlier drone directive was covered, and it lines up with recent reporting that frames Drone Dominance as a sharper, more execution-focused effort than previous attempts to rapidly make a ton of drones.

What to Watch During the February 18th Gauntlet

If the Pentagon is serious about “buy what works,” the Gauntlet should reveal what they’re prioritizing right now:

• Ease of use in the field, under pressure
• Reliability and field maintainability
• EW resilience and link options
• Unit cost at scale and production reality, not promises
• Delivery timelines that actually hit the five-month window

DroneXL’s Take

This is the right kind of pressure.

The upside is obvious. If Drone Dominance stays disciplined, it forces companies to build drones that are simple, reliable, and scalable. Not prototypes that never turn into production units. “The Gauntlet” is an approach I’d like to see adopted more in the UAS industry, and not just for the airframes.

Twenty-five vendors means twenty-five ecosystems. Batteries, props, firmware, ground stations, spare parts, training, tech support, all of it.

If the Pentagon isn’t ruthless about consolidation after Phase One, units are going to end up juggling a Frankenstein fleet of incompatible systems, and that could ultimately mean casualties in combat.

Still, February 18 at Fort Benning is the starting line. If the Pentagon actually follows through and goes with the winning airframe, this could be one of the first drone programs in a long time that moves at the same speed as the rest of the world.