Correction, August 16, 2026: This article originally reported the order as “nearly 3,000” X10D drones and its headline described the purchase as the largest single-vendor sUAS purchase in U.S. military history. Skydio’s own announcement puts the order at more than 2,500 units and describes it as the largest such procurement in U.S. Army history, a narrower claim. The implied per-unit figure of roughly $17,300 was calculated from the higher count and does not hold: because Skydio published both the unit count and the dollar figure as floors, the implied cost lands somewhere between roughly $17,000 and $21,000. The headline, the unit counts, and the per-unit figures below have been updated. The original reporting and analysis are otherwise unchanged.
The U.S. Army has placed an order exceeding $52 million with Skydio for more than 2,500 X10D drones, the company announced today. It is the largest small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) procurement from a single vendor in Army history. The contract moved from bid to award in under 72 hours, bypassing the multi-year acquisition timelines that have defined Pentagon drone procurement for decades. The order was placed through Atlantic Diving Supply (ADS), a defense contracting vehicle the Army has used before to move quickly outside traditional channels.
Skydio published both figures as floors, more than 2,500 units and more than $52 million, which puts the implied per-unit cost somewhere between roughly $17,000 and $21,000. Either end of that range sits inside the $16,000 to $25,000 band DroneXL has reported for the X10 platform in public safety deployments. Skydio CEO Adam Bry put the cost reduction in sharper terms on X: capability that used to cost millions per drone is now 100 times cheaper, the result of self-funded R&D and the scale that comes from competing against Chinese drones in the civilian market. At that price and volume, this is not a test order. The Army is fielding at scale.
The X10D Was Sharpened in Ukraine and Built to Hunt Targets for Killer Drones
Bry was direct about where the X10D learned its most important lessons. “X10D was sharpened by hard lessons in Ukraine and close iterative feedback with our soldiers through initiatives like the Army’s Transformation in Contact,” he wrote. The tactical role he describes is specific: the X10D is a “hunter” drone, designed to locate targets for “killer” one-way attack munitions to strike. That hunter-killer pairing is already standard practice in Ukraine, where ISR drones spot targets and FPV drones or loitering munitions finish them. The Army is now buying the hunter at scale.
The Skydio X10D is the defense-specific variant of the X10 platform, built from the start for GPS-denied and electronically contested battlefields. Six custom navigation cameras (three on top, three below) map terrain in real time using Visual Inertial Odometry, allowing the drone to hold position, navigate, and return home even when satellite signals are jammed or spoofed. Its multiband radio switches frequencies dynamically to maintain connectivity in high-interference environments.
The sensor suite supports that hunting role directly. It carries a 48-megapixel telephoto camera, a 50.3-megapixel wide-angle camera, and a 64-megapixel narrow camera. The thermal system is the first on any small UAS to integrate a Teledyne FLIR Boson+ sensor, capable of 640×512 resolution with sensitivity down to 30mK. That’s enough to detect a person’s thermal signature in conditions where cheaper sensors produce noise. The whole package weighs 2.11kg (4.65 lbs) fully loaded, folds to backpack size, and is ready to fly in 40 seconds.
Maximum radio range is 12km on the Connect SL link. Top speed is 45 mph. The IP55 rating covers dust and water. Operating temperature range runs from -4°F to 113°F (-20°C to 45°C). Our Skydio X10 guide breaks down the full spec sheet and what separates the X10D from the base aircraft.
Skydio Has Held the Army’s SRR Contract Through Both Tranches
Today’s order does not come out of nowhere. The Army selected Skydio for its Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) Program of Record in February 2022 under a five-year Other Transaction Agreement worth up to $99.8 million. That was Tranche 1, built around the X2D. In January 2024, Skydio entered the final phase of Tranche 2 with the X10D as the replacement platform. In May 2025, Skydio fulfilled the first Tranche 2 order, shipping hundreds of X10Ds within five days to an Army Transforming in Contact unit preparing for deployment. By October 2025, the Army added a $7.9 million Tranche 2 Low-Rate Initial Production contract in partnership with SAIC, bringing total SRR Tranche 2 support to $12.3 million in FY25.
Today’s $52 million order is more than four times the entire FY25 Tranche 2 total. Skydio is the only manufacturer to have been selected for both tranches of the SRR program. Bry specifically congratulated the Program Executive Office, Maneuver Aviation and Fixed Wing (@PAE_ManeuverAir) for “listening to their end users and doubling down on what’s working.”
Skydio’s Hayward Factory Built 55,000 Drones Before This Order Hit
At Skydio’s Hayward, California facility, one of the largest drone manufacturing plants outside China, each X10D passes 550 individual assembly and test checkpoints before shipping. The company has refined its production process to the point where a single X10D can be built in nine minutes. Output currently runs more than 1,000 drones per month, with the ability to scale beyond that rate. Adding more than 2,500 units to the queue at nine minutes each represents upwards of 375 production hours. The factory can handle it.
Bry framed the cost advantage explicitly as a competition with China. Skydio competes against Chinese drones in the civilian market “in the tens of thousands of units per year,” he wrote, and that civilian scale is what drives the military price down. As DroneXL reported in February, federal agencies have been moving fast on Skydio acquisitions across law enforcement and defense. The Army’s 72-hour timeline reflects the same urgency driving procurement at every level of U.S. government right now.
DroneXL’s Take
The 72-hour turnaround is the real story here. Standard Pentagon acquisition for a contract this size normally takes months. The Army routed this through Atlantic Diving Supply, a commercial contracting vehicle, specifically to compress that timeline. That’s not an administrative quirk. It’s a signal that someone with authority decided more than 2,500 X10Ds needed to be moving toward units faster than the normal process allows. I’ve been covering the X10D’s progression through the SRR program since Skydio entered Tranche 2, and the acceleration from hundreds of units in May 2025 to more than 2,500 in a single order nine months later is a steep curve. Something operational is driving demand at that pace.
Bry’s hunter-killer framing is the detail that should get the most attention. He’s not describing a surveillance drone. He’s describing a targeting system for one-way attack munitions, a role the Ukrainian military pioneered and the U.S. Army is now formally scaling. The X10D finds the target. Something else destroys it. At something in the neighborhood of $20,000 per unit, the Army can afford to lose hunters in contested airspace and keep buying more. That math changes the calculus on acceptable attrition rates. It also explains the volume. You don’t order more than 2,500 ISR drones for gentle peacetime reconnaissance. You order them because you expect to use them hard and replace them.
The per-unit price is also worth noting in domestic context. Even at the top of the implied range, this order prices the X10D at or below what Fairfax County paid in its Drone as First Responder rollout. Volume is doing its work. By the end of 2026, expect a Tranche 3 announcement or a follow-on order that pushes total Army X10D deliveries past 5,000 units. The question is whether any allied nation (Spain signed an $18.7 million deal in February 2025, Norway is already receiving systems) decides to match the Army’s pace.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
