Department of Defense
Every UASFeed story on Department of Defense — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
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Industry & Contracts
Skydio Gets Its Whole Lineup Cleared — Including the First Blue UAS Drone-in-a-Box for DFR
Skydio's X10, Dock for X10 and R10 joined the Blue UAS Cleared List on 23 July 2026, making its entire lineup cleared and the Dock the first Blue UAS-cleared drone-as-first-responder system — unlocking Byrne JAG, COPS and HSGP grant money just as the list itself moves from DIU to DCMA.
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Industry & Contracts
Cathie Wood's Ark Invest Piles Into Kratos Defense as Drone and Anti-Drone Budget Bets Pay Off
Ark Invest bought roughly $9.1 million of Kratos Defense stock in early July 2026, betting on a drone maker whose unmanned systems revenue is growing over 30% amid a proposed $70 billion Pentagon drone budget.
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Industry & Contracts
Kratos Adds 100,000+ Square Feet to Oklahoma City Plant to Scale Jet-Drone Output
Kratos is expanding its Oklahoma City campus by more than 100,000 square feet to push jet-drone output beyond 165 units a year, backing Valkyrie, Firejet and Taiwan's Mighty Hornet IV programs.
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Industry & Contracts
A Federal DJI Ban Just Cost One Oregon Police Department $18,000 a Drone — the Skydio Swap, Line by Line
Redmond, Oregon approved a $410,762, five-year financed Axon contract for six Skydio drones to replace its DJI fleet — a 3.5x price jump driven by the federal NDAA ban, not operational need.
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Industry & Contracts
AeroVironment's Q4 Blowout: A $642M Quarter, a $1.2B Backlog, and the 'Drone Supercycle' Goes Mainstream
AeroVironment crushed estimates with a record $641.6M fiscal Q4, doubled annual revenue to nearly $2B, and grew funded backlog to $1.2B — sending shares up ~19% and turning 'drone supercycle' talk into public-market fact.
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Industry & Contracts
The Drone-Stock Supercycle: Pentagon Weighs Equity Stakes as DAWG Budget Balloons to $54.6B
U.S. drone stocks extended a sharp run in late June 2026 on reports the Pentagon is weighing equity stakes in domestic makers — the backdrop being a $54.6B FY27 request for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, up from a $225M base.
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Industry & Contracts
AeroVironment: How a Glider Champion Built America's Tactical Drone Empire
From Paul MacCready's human-powered aircraft to a $990 million Switchblade contract and a $4.1 billion BlueHalo merger, AeroVironment has quietly become the backbone of U.S. tactical UAS — and is now reshaping itself into a multi-domain defense-tech mid-prime.
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Industry & Contracts
Anduril Industries: The Software Company Rebuilding the Defense Industrial Base
Founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and four co-founders, Anduril Industries has grown from a border-surveillance startup into a $30.5 billion defense technology company producing autonomous systems across air, sea, and ground domains on its Lattice AI platform.
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Industry & Contracts
DJI Dominates the Drone Market — And Washington Wants It Out
DJI controls over 70% of the global commercial drone market and 90% of consumer sales, yet faces an effective US ban after a cascade of legislative and regulatory actions. Six independent audits have found no evidence of covert data exfiltration — but the structural debate is far from resolved.
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Industry & Contracts
DroneShield: The Counter-UAS Company Redefining Drone Defense at Scale
From a 2014 Virginia startup to an ASX200-listed company with 4,000+ systems deployed in 70 nations, DroneShield has built the counter-UAS industry’s most comprehensive product line—and is now betting that software subscriptions, not hardware sales, define its next decade.
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Industry & Contracts
Skydio Explained: The Autonomy-First Company Built to Replace DJI in American Defense
Founded by MIT researchers who trained on Google's Project Wing, Skydio built America's leading small-drone platform by betting on AI autonomy before the defense market existed. Congressional bans on Chinese hardware turned that bet into a franchise—then China struck back.
