The U.S. Army's UAS Marketplace — a digital storefront built with Amazon Web Services that lets units order drones the way a shopper orders a household good — has crossed $750 million in sales since its March 24 launch, and the Army is now expanding it to cover a much heavier class of aircraft.
The marketplace debuted at the Association of the U.S. Army's Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, with about 30 Group 1 and Group 2 systems (drones up to 55 pounds) listed for units, government partners and allied nations to browse, compare and order directly. The Army built it in partnership with Amazon Web Services and its own Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, borrowing directly from the cloud-commerce playbook AWS built for civilian retail rather than designing a bespoke defense-acquisition storefront from scratch.
From Small Drones to Group 3
The catalog has since grown toward a target of 70-plus systems, with Group 3 aircraft — those weighing up to 1,320 pounds — rolling in as part of a summer expansion, alongside complete air vehicles, payloads, software and autonomy algorithms sold as standalone components rather than bundled systems. The Army is aiming to onboard hundreds of vendor companies over the next two years.
Col. Danielle Medaglia, the Army's Project Manager for UAS, described the shift as more than a convenience upgrade: "This really gives soldiers the access they need to capabilities that meet their needs way different than before, a fundamental pivot in how we execute acquisition for uncrewed aircraft systems." Lt. Col. Jeff Bess serves as product manager for the marketplace itself, with Michael "Ski" Horrocks as deputy project manager for UAS and Brent Ingraham as the Army's acquisition chief overseeing the effort.
Cutting Weeks Out of Procurement
Vendor onboarding currently takes roughly 30 days, and the Army says it's working to automate that process down to days or weeks — a direct attack on the slow, paperwork-heavy acquisition cycle that has historically kept frontline units stuck with outdated drone hardware while commercial technology moved faster. The Army has also opened early discussions with the United Kingdom and, per the service, "a couple other countries" about extending marketplace access to allied militaries — a step that would let NATO partners tap the same vetted vendor pool the Army has spent six months building out, rather than running separate national procurement pipelines for the same categories of small drones.
Newly Added Group 3 Aircraft
The Group 3 systems now joining the catalog fly at a different scale entirely: up to 1,320 pounds, with an 18,000-foot ceiling and top speeds of 287 mph, well beyond the small hand-launched aircraft that made up the marketplace's original 30-item catalog. Rodney Davis, Capability Program Executive for Aviation, said the expansion reflects the marketplace's founding design principle: "Agility is at the core of the UAS Marketplace architecture." Medaglia echoed that framing, describing the goal as giving units "the power of choice" rather than a single prescribed drone for every mission set.
Units have already put the marketplace to use in training. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division and Fox Company of the 1-82 Attack Battalion, part of the 82nd's Combat Aviation Brigade, have both drawn on marketplace listings, and paratroopers at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana have trained with Orqa first-person-view drones sourced through the platform.
Why It Matters
The marketplace's growth mirrors a broader push across the Pentagon to buy drones the way the commercial sector does — fast, iteratively, and without the multi-year program-of-record timelines that have left US forces watching Ukraine's rapid drone innovation cycle from the sidelines. Extending the model to Group 3 systems, and potentially to allied buyers, signals the Army sees the marketplace less as a pilot program and more as the new default channel for how uncrewed systems reach soldiers.
