Drone Dominance Gauntlet I: Skycutter Tops Leaderboard As Pentagon Prepares $150 Million Attack Drone Order

The Department of War’s Drone Dominance Program has published its Gauntlet I leaderboard, naming 11 companies set to receive orders for a combined 30,000 one-way attack drones worth up to $150 million. Brandon Torres Declet, CEO of Exyn Technologies and a longtime drone industry veteran, posted the results to X on March 6, drawing immediate attention across the defense community. The announcement came one week after U.S. forces fired American-made one-way attack drones in combat for the first time during Operation Epic Fury against Iran — making these results land with far more weight than a routine procurement announcement.

The development:

• Skycutter topped the leaderboard with 99.3 points, followed by Neros (87.5) and Napatree Technology (80.3), with the bottom seven companies separated by less than three points — a remarkably tight finish.
• Ukrainian Defense Drones (UDD) ranked sixth with 72.9 points, one of at least two Ukrainian-connected companies to receive orders. Pentagon program manager Travis Metz confirmed to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 5 that Ukrainian companies “are likely to get orders” and have committed to stand up manufacturing in the United States.
• Orders will be placed “over the next few days,” Metz told senators on March 5, according to Breaking Defense. Winning vendors have five months to deliver. Phase II begins in August with a target of 50,000 to 60,000 additional drones — and a harder test that includes GPS denial, communications jamming, and electronic warfare.
• The full leaderboard and scoring methodology are published at dronedominance.mil.

Gauntlet I Scores Separate Leaders From the Pack

The Drone Dominance Program’s first competitive evaluation ran from February 18 through early March at Fort Benning, Georgia. Twenty-five vendors competed. Eleven received orders. The scoring was done entirely by military operators — roughly 100 servicemembers from the Army, Marine Corps, and special operations community — who flew each system against simulated combat scenarios with only two hours of training per platform.

The full leaderboard:

The gap between first and second place — nearly 12 points — is striking. So is the gap between second and third — another 7 points. Below that, seven companies finished within 2.9 points of each other. The scoring methodology and a note from the test directors are posted on the official program site.

One name on the leaderboard that wasn’t on the original February 3 published list of 25 Phase I competitors: Skycutter. The Department of War did not immediately respond to requests for clarification on whether Skycutter entered the competition as a late addition or through a different mechanism. We will update this article when we receive a response.

Also notable: Kratos SRE and Teal Drones — the only two publicly traded companies in the field — do not appear in the top 11. Both had been widely watched by investors. Their absence will likely move stock prices when markets open.

The Senate Hearing Gave the Program Its Sharpest Public Framing Yet

At the March 5 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the American small drone industrial base, SASC Chairman Roger Wicker delivered the clearest statement yet of why the U.S. is in this position. China, he said, used tens of billions in state subsidies, predatory pricing, and supply chain control to capture more than 90 percent of the global non-military small drone market. The result: American drones now cost five to 25 times more than Chinese equivalents.

“Both the American commercial drone industry and the Pentagon are years behind the curve in producing and employing drones,” Wicker said in his opening statement. “Catching up is as necessary as it is difficult.”

Wicker also confirmed the funding numbers. Last year’s reconciliation law — the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — set aside $2.5 billion for the domestic drone industry. Just over $1 billion of that goes specifically to the Group 1 FPV competition that Gauntlet I is part of. The program expects to deliver 300,000 drones by next year from that demand signal alone.

He directly referenced the LUCAS combat debut: “Just a few days ago, America used one-way attack drones for the first time in combat in Iran, with Task Force Scorpion firing the LUCAS drone, a reverse-engineered Shahed-136.”

The prepared testimony from Senior Advisor for Drone Dominance Owen West and program manager Travis Metz added a detail that most coverage has missed: Phase II will ban systems that use motors or batteries from “covered countries” — meaning Chinese components. Phase I vendors can still receive orders now, but starting in August, that door closes. Any company in the top 11 currently relying on Chinese motors or batteries has roughly five months to find alternative suppliers before the next Gauntlet. DefenseScoop has additional detail on the delivery timeline and Phase II requirements.

Operation Epic Fury Changes What This Competition Means

The Drone Dominance Program has been running in parallel with a shooting war. On February 28, CENTCOM’s Task Force Scorpion Strike used the LUCAS drone in combat for the first time against Iranian targets during Operation Epic Fury — IRGC command nodes, air defense assets, and missile launch infrastructure. Iran responded with Shaheds targeting U.S. bases across the Gulf.

LUCAS is a Shahed-136 reverse-engineered by Arizona-based SpektreWorks. It costs $35,000 per unit. The 25 companies that just competed at Fort Benning are building something designed to cost $5,000 — with a goal of less than $2,000 per unit by the program’s final phase, according to Metz’s Senate testimony. The performance gap between what LUCAS demonstrated in combat and what the Gauntlet winners are expected to deliver is the reason this competition matters beyond a procurement announcement.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who recently visited Ukrainian drone producers in Odesa, pushed back on the six-month cycle between Gauntlets. “What they were talking about in Ukraine was iterating those drones every two weeks because of warfare,” she said, according to Breaking Defense. “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’s response: Ukrainian companies participated in Gauntlet I, they’re likely to receive orders, and they’ve committed to manufacture in the United States.

DroneXL’s Take

The Skycutter number is the story. A 99.3 out of 100 from military operators who had two hours of training per system means the drone either flew flawlessly under conditions that broke other platforms, or the evaluation criteria heavily weighted operator experience — and Skycutter nailed both. That’s a meaningful signal, not a statistical artifact. The 12-point gap to second place Neros isn’t noise.

What I find more interesting is the compression at the bottom. Seven companies finished within three points of each other. That’s not a clear performance hierarchy — that’s seven companies that all crossed roughly the same threshold. The DoW called it right: this isn’t a pure down-select, it’s a demand signal. The field stays competitive on purpose.

The Chinese components deadline in Phase II deserves more attention than it’s getting. I’ve been covering the global race to build Shahed-class drones since September, and the supply chain problem is real. The motors, batteries, and flight controllers that make small FPV drones cheap are overwhelmingly Chinese-sourced. Winning Gauntlet I with Chinese components and then scrambling to replace them before August is a very different challenge than it looks from the outside. Several of these 11 companies are going to find that out the hard way.

The broader context is one we’ve been tracking since the CENTCOM LUCAS deployment in December and the Yuma testing coverage before that. The U.S. is no longer practicing for drone warfare. It is conducting it. LUCAS flew against Iran the same week these 25 companies were still competing at Fort Benning. That is not a coincidence of timing — that is the entire point of the program. The DoW is buying what soldiers say they would take to war. Skycutter, apparently, is something soldiers would take to war.

Expect Gauntlet II in August to be a much harder filter. The GPS denial and electronic warfare requirements will eliminate any system that was built for a benign RF environment. The companies that finish in the middle of this leaderboard should be thinking about that now, not in July.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.