Pentagon Requests $75 Billion For Drones In FY27, With DAWG Getting The Largest Year-Over-Year Boost Of Any Defense Program

The Pentagon’s fiscal 2027 budget request earmarks $75 billion for drones and counter-drone technology, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing defense officials briefed on the plan. The bulk of that money, $54.6 billion, would go to the Defense Autonomous Working Group, a little-known office operating under U.S. Special Operations Command that received just $225.9 million in FY26. Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio and Roxana Tiron describe the jump as “the largest single year-over-year boost of any defense program or office” and flag that it will draw particular congressional scrutiny inside an already historic $1.5 trillion Pentagon request that is 42% larger than this year’s budget.

DAWG is the rebranded home of the Biden-era Replicator initiative, which Pentagon leadership moved to SOCOM in late 2025 after the program struggled to meet its fielding targets. DroneXL has tracked that transition since the Wall Street Journal first exposed a string of test failures in September 2025. What was a $225.9 million test-and-evaluation office last year is now slated to become a $54.6 billion procurement engine. Note: Bloomberg’s “Working Group” naming differs from the “Defense Autonomous Warfare Group” used in the Pentagon’s own November 2025 statement to the Washington Times and most prior reporting. Both refer to DAWG.

DAWG Budget Jumps From $225.9 Million To $54.6 Billion In One Year

The Defense Autonomous Working Group sits inside U.S. Special Operations Command and is directed by Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Francis Donovan, according to the Pentagon’s November 2025 statement to the Washington Times. It works directly with commandos to test and evaluate autonomous systems for combat use. The FY27 request turns that office into a $54.6 billion procurement engine in a single budget cycle, which on the raw math is roughly a 243-fold increase and has been widely described as such in analyst coverage.

Aviation Week called DAWG “arguably” the biggest winner in a budget full of superlatives. For context, the $54.6 billion DAWG line exceeds the entire Marine Corps budget request of $52.8 billion, a comparison drawn in a recent Hill opinion piece by defense policy advisor Paul Hayden Miller. The DAWG line alone works out to roughly 3.6% of the full $1.5 trillion request.

DAWG inherited Replicator’s mission after the original program, announced by former Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in August 2023 at the NDIA Emerging Technologies conference, missed its August 2025 target of fielding thousands of attritable autonomous systems. A November 2025 Washington Times review concluded the program “seems to have fielded only hundreds, not thousands” by the target date, with the exact figure classified. A Pentagon statement issued days later said the entire Replicator portfolio had “transitioned from the Defense Innovation Unit to a newly formed Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG)” under SOCOM.

Counter-Drone Funding Also Jumps, From $6.5 Million To $580 Million

The other half of the $75 billion request targets counter-unmanned aircraft systems. The Pentagon’s new joint counter-drone body, Joint Interagency Task Force 401, is asking for $580.3 million in research, development, test, and evaluation funds in FY27, up from $6.5 million the year before, according to Defense Daily. Procurement dollars for fielded counter-drone systems are a separate and currently undisclosed figure on top of that.

JIATF 401 was stood up by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth through an August 28, 2025 memorandum directing Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to establish it, with the older Army-led Joint Counter-small UAS Office disestablished as part of the same directive. Hegseth cited lessons from Ukraine and the homeland airspace incursions of late 2025 as the justification. DefenseScoop and Defense News both covered the transition at the time. The scale of the FY27 request reflects what Ukraine has demonstrated across four years of war, which is that a $500 FPV drone can disable a $10 million armored vehicle, and that without layered counter-drone defense, high-value U.S. platforms are sitting targets.

The Budget Codifies An 18-Month Policy Shift Toward Ukraine-Style Drone Warfare

The FY27 request locks in a direction the Trump administration has been building since taking office. Defense Secretary Hegseth’s July 2025 memo eliminated decades-old restrictions that treated drones as durable equipment rather than consumable munitions. President Trump’s June 2025 executive order, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directed federal agencies to prioritize American-manufactured systems across both military and commercial applications. The Pentagon’s DOGE unit seized control of drone procurement in late October 2025, per Reuters reporting, targeting an initial 30,000-unit buy. Two weeks later, the Army announced plans to acquire 1 million small drones in what was one of the largest single-service drone commitments ever announced.

Running alongside DAWG is the separate Drone Dominance campaign for smaller FPV-class systems, with a procurement target of 200,000 autonomous platforms by 2027. DAWG handles larger, longer-range attack drones suited to Pacific distances; Drone Dominance funds the small, cheap strike systems that have defined the Ukraine front line.

DroneXL’s Take

A 243-fold budget increase in a single fiscal year is not acquisition reform. It is a structural bet, and in my view it carries real execution risk. When I covered Replicator’s failures last September, the question was whether the Pentagon could salvage the program at all. The answer, apparently, is to give its successor more money than the entire Marine Corps.

Congressional scrutiny is guaranteed, and it should be. In my analysis, an office that obligated $225.9 million last year does not have the contracting staff, acceptance-testing infrastructure, or program management bandwidth to responsibly spend $54.6 billion in twelve months. The Ukraine war has proven that cheap autonomous systems can impose outsized costs on expensive platforms, and that case is the strongest argument for the Pentagon’s position. It has not proven that the U.S. defense acquisition system, as currently configured, knows how to buy those systems at scale without the interoperability and quality problems that dogged Replicator.

Here is where I expect the money to land. American manufacturers such as Skydio, AeroVironment, Anduril, Red Cat, and Skyways will capture the largest share of DAWG procurement because Blue UAS and NDAA compliance rules foreclose DJI and other Chinese platforms entirely. Anduril’s $20 billion Lattice AI ceiling contract is the kind of open-architecture deal that fits DAWG’s mandate most cleanly. My prediction, offered as analysis: Congress approves close to the full $54.6 billion, but DAWG obligates less than 60% in FY27 because the contracting apparatus does not yet exist. Watch for a rescission or reprogramming fight by summer 2027.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.