News, deep dives, and analysis — every Department of Defense story, newest first.
Department of Defense drone coverage tracks Pentagon procurement, the office structures deciding where military drone money goes, and the hardware being cleared for military purchase.
Command structure changed meaningfully this year: a Pentagon drone czar memo hands the Defense Innovation Unit the front door to a $75 billion unmanned systems portfolio, centralizing authority that used to be split across service branches. The dollar figures moving through that structure are large: the Pentagon committed $1.3 billion to drones in two days, split between shoot-down systems and domestic parts manufacturing.
The Blue UAS list is where a lot of that procurement authority becomes concrete: Mountain Horse’s Talon DT-300 putting 100 pounds of payload capacity on the Blue UAS list is a direct expansion of what buyers can acquire without a separate security review. Domestic shipbuilding is following the same defense-dollar logic: Saronic is planning a $3 billion Texas shipyard for drone ships.
The broader US Government desk and FAA desk cover the civilian regulatory side of the same policy landscape. Every Department of Defense drone story is in the feed below.
Last updated August 24, 2026 — the feed below updates with every new story.
Saildrone and Lockheed Martin fired two JAGM missiles from a Surveyor USV at RIMPAC 2026, the first missile launch from the company's uncrewed ships.
Sikorsky has completed the initial ground and flight test phase of its Nomad 100 tail-sitting drone for DARPA's EVADE program, sending the 18-foot hybrid-electric aircraft to a government facility for a more demanding multirole test campaign.
Zelenskyy told Laura Loomer that U.S.-Ukraine drone cooperation will include a factory on American soil, days before he meets Trump. F-Drones already broke ground in Ohio, and the export deal behind the announcement still rests on anonymous sources.
Saronic says it will spend $3 billion to build Port Alpha in Brownsville, a Texas shipyard for autonomous and crewed vessels that could reshape the industrial scale of maritime drone production.
Mountain Horse Solutions is pitching the Talon DT-300 Drone Plus to U.S. government buyers with a simple argument: this fully electric tandem-rotor VTOL can lift 100 pounds and already sits on the Pentagon's Blue UAS Cleared List.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum on June 29 creating a single Pentagon office with authority over nearly every unmanned systems program in the U.S. military. The Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems, or DRPM-UxS, reports straight to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg and absorbs the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group along with the…
Members of growingSTEMS Robotics Team 836A, known as The Hive Mind, toured ABSI Aerospace and Defense in California, Maryland this month to see how the company builds the expendable unmanned targets the U.S. military uses to train against hostile drones. The Hollywood, Maryland team had just returned from the VEX IQ World Championship in St.…
The framework drone agreement that Ukraine has been pushing Washington to sign for nearly a year is still unsigned, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy used a national U.S. broadcast to say exactly what is holding it up. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation that aired Sunday, the Ukrainian president said his country and the United…
A Pentagon drone czar memo hands the Defense Innovation Unit the front door to a $75 billion unmanned systems portfolio, centralizing decision-making authority over a huge share of military drone spending that was previously spread across separate service branches.
Large and frequent. The Pentagon committed $1.3 billion to drones in two days, split between counter-drone systems and domestic component manufacturing, on top of continuing investment in new airframes and the Blue UAS approved-hardware list.
Blue UAS is the Defense Innovation Unit's list of drones cleared for military and government purchase without a case-by-case security review. Mountain Horse's Talon DT-300 putting 100 pounds of payload capacity on the Blue UAS list expands what buyers can procure off that list without added review.
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