The people running the Pentagon's small-drone buildup are saying openly that the demand behind it is manufactured. Jon Strzelec, the small-drone manufacturing lead at Army Materiel Command, has described the effort as an attempt to "artificially induce" demand so a US drone supply chain can form. The companies expected to build that supply chain answer with arithmetic. Performance Drone Works (PDW), which did not place in the first competition round, says a factory needs a steady order book, not a single award.
Those remarks reached UASFeed through DroneXL's October 26 report, which cites Breaking Defense. We did not read Breaking Defense's original article, so its quotes appear here only as DroneXL relayed them. The order figures below come from the Drone Dominance Program's own leaderboard data, which we read directly.
What PDW is asking for
PDW CEO James Slider described the purchase his company wants: one award, followed by 1,000 drones a month for a year. That comes to 12,000 aircraft. "We need to see sustained, normalized demand," Slider told Breaking Defense, according to DroneXL.
Twelve thousand drones may not sound like much next to a program that counts in the tens of thousands. The program's own numbers show it is a big ask for any one vendor.
What the leaderboard shows
The Drone Dominance Program publishes results on a leaderboard page that runs on JavaScript. The figures sit in a vendor data file on dronedominance.mil, and that file is where we took the numbers from.
Gauntlet I. Eleven vendors received orders. Skycutter came first with 99.3 points and a base order of 2,560 drones, all of them listed as ordered, shipped and accepted. The other base orders step down: 2,400, 2,320, 2,240, 2,160, 2,000, 1,920, 1,840, 1,760, 1,600 and 1,520. DroneXL reports that the round split 30,000 drones among the eleven winners, from 1,520 for Farage Precision up to 4,960 for Neros once bonus orders are counted. Six vendors received bonus orders. Neros's bonus line shows 2,560 ordered, 2,000 shipped and 880 accepted. The other bonus lines (880, 1,320, 1,240, 880 and 800) all show zero shipped. PDW appears in the data among the Gauntlet I competitors that did not make the top 11.
Winners also had to meet deadlines. According to DroneXL, each vendor had to ship half its base order within 2.5 months and the rest within 4.5 months. The largest Gauntlet I base order was 2,560 drones, delivered over roughly four and a half months. That is about one-fifth of PDW's proposed year. Even Neros's 4,960 including bonus falls short of half of 12,000.
Gauntlet II. Nineteen companies moved on to the second round, which DroneXL says covered 30,000 drones in each of two missions, with orders for the top five ranging from 8,000 down to 4,000. The data file lists:
- Deep Strike: Perennial Autonomy (80.1 points, 8,000 drones), Hyperscale (70.9, 7,000), Neros (69.8, 6,000), Skycutter (66.6, 5,000), Swarm Defense Technologies (66.0, 4,000).
- Close Quarters Battle: Neros (88.1, 8,000), ORQA US (82.8, 7,000), XTEND Reality (80.2, 6,000), Vector (78.2, 5,000), ModalAI (74.3, 4,000).
No single Gauntlet II placement reaches 12,000. The one vendor above that line is Neros, which placed in both missions and announced a combined order of 14,000 drones, according to DroneXL. In Gauntlet II, a single company winning twice is the only case that matches the year of production PDW says it needs.
The government side of the argument
Defense officials don't entirely disagree. Andrew Evans of the Army G-2 Strategy and Transformation Office stated the problem as a question, quoted by DroneXL: "How do you incentivize industry to build if your ordering period is so episodic?"
Strzelec's word "artificially" reads more as a description than an admission. The government is acting as the anchor customer for an industry that, by the officials' own account, many makers won't invest in without it. The Gauntlet format, with competitive fly-offs, ranked results and tight delivery windows, is meant to sort vendors and test whether they can deliver. It does not guarantee a winner a predictable monthly run rate, and the program leaves no follow-on order promised between rounds.
Not every manufacturer sees a drought
Established players read the market differently. Skydio Chief Revenue Officer Callan Carpenter said on October 13, as DroneXL reported: "The demand signals are very strong, and it's not just DOW either." Skydio has a track record to cite: DroneXL notes an Army order worth $52 million for more than 2,500 X10D aircraft in March, placed outside the Drone Dominance Program.
AeroVironment's Chad Chasteen, speaking at AUSA, was blunter about cause and effect: "There is no supply without demand." DroneXL says he wants continuous orders to follow continuous competitions, a position close to PDW's.
The split seems to follow company position. Skydio, with a large Army order that came outside the Gauntlets, sees a strong signal. Firms counting on competition wins to fill new factory space see a gap between one award and the next.
The money is requested, not appropriated
Washington's stated plans are much bigger than its current orders. At AUSA's Project Agincourt panel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is requesting roughly $50 billion in reconciliation funding to scale autonomous and robotic systems from thousands of units to millions, according to C4ISRNet's October 14 report. He said: "Ultimately we will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of one-way attack systems this year and into the millions in years to come."
C4ISRNet describes the reconciliation request as a one-time investment, separate from the FY2027 budget request. In C4ISRNet's account, that budget request includes $53.6 billion for Drone Dominance: $16.9 billion for unmanned-system procurement, $14.4 billion for counter-unmanned systems, $13.5 billion for contested logistics, $4.5 billion for collaborative autonomy and $4.3 billion for institutional systems and personnel. The outlet also notes that the budget request does not establish that the reconciliation money is the same money or that it is dedicated entirely to drones. DroneXL cites a $54.6 billion FY27 figure for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. The two outlets report different totals, and UASFeed hasn't reconciled them against budget documents.
DroneXL reports that the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group money has not been appropriated and that most of it rides on a reconciliation package Congress has not passed. That matters most to a factory planner. The Autonomous Warfare Command Hegseth ordered on September 30 also needs legislation, according to DroneXL. The Army's earlier commitment is smaller: in December 2025 it announced a $1 billion initiative to buy approximately 340,000 small UAS over two years, C4ISRNet reports.
Government support for PDW's capacity so far has come partly as financing. DroneXL notes that the company holds a conditional loan commitment of up to $820 million from the Office of Strategic Capital, signed July 31, to build drone component capacity, and that PDW also holds Army contracts for reconnaissance drones such as the C100. A loan can pay for a production line. It can't keep that line busy.
Why It Matters
The Pentagon's drone goals depend on companies building capacity before contracts exist to justify it. The leaderboard shows what the program has actually ordered: per-vendor buys between 1,520 and 8,000 drones, issued in competition rounds months apart, with most Gauntlet I bonus orders not yet shipped. Making and holding a rate of 1,000 drones a month means paying for tooling, labor and supply contracts that only make sense if orders keep coming. If the tens of billions requested for FY2027 and reconciliation get through Congress, the "artificial" demand could turn into a real market. If they don't, many of the vendors Gauntlet was meant to build up may decide that winning a ranking is not the same as having a business.
