The Pentagon has unveiled a list of 25 small technology and drone companies selected to compete in the Department of Defense's Drone Dominance Program — a $1.1 billion initiative designed to flood the American arsenal with low-cost, one-way attack drones at a pace the defense bureaucracy has never attempted.

The program's ambition is blunt: produce 30,000 drones at roughly $5,000 per unit, selected through a competitive gauntlet evaluated not by procurement officials in Washington but by warfighters themselves. Competitive improvement cycles, the Pentagon said, will be:

"Measured in months, not years."

That single line tells you everything about the shift underway.

The Gauntlet

As reported by The Daily Mail, the program rolls out in four phases. The first — dubbed "The Gauntlet" — begins February 18 at Fort Benning, Georgia, and wraps in early March. From the initial pool of 25 companies, the Pentagon plans to purchase approximately $150 million in prototype drones. Within five months of evaluation, those prototypes ship out. Twelve vendors will ultimately be selected to produce the full run of 30,000 units.

Among the competitors already named: Kratos SRE Inc. and Halo Aeronautics. The remaining 23 companies have not been publicly identified. The structure is deliberately Darwinian — build it, prove it works under real conditions, or lose the contract. No lobbying campaign rescues a drone that can't perform.

This is procurement redesigned as competition, not committee. And it's long overdue.

A War Already Proving the Concept

Four years of continuous combat between Ukraine and Russia have turned one-way attack drones from a tactical curiosity into a centerpiece of modern warfare. Cheap, expendable, and devastating in swarms, these weapons have rewritten assumptions about what it takes to control a battlefield. Expensive platforms still matter — but a $5,000 drone that destroys a million-dollar vehicle changes the math overnight.

The lesson wasn't subtle. It was broadcast in high definition from the Donbas for years. The question was whether the Pentagon — an institution famous for spending a decade and $10 billion to field a weapon system that arrives obsolete — could absorb it fast enough to matter.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's July 2025 memo suggests the answer is yes. In it, he laid out the doctrine plainly:

"Drone dominance is a process race as much as a technological race. We are buying what works –– fast, at scale, and without bureaucratic delay. Lethality will not be hindered by self–imposed restrictions."

That last sentence deserves attention. For years, the defense acquisition system imposed restrictions that had nothing to do with capability and everything to do with process — compliance layers, diversity requirements, environmental reviews, endless reporting obligations that rewarded large contractors with armies of lawyers and punished small innovators who could actually build things. Hegseth is signaling that the era of lethality-by-committee is over.

Why Small Companies Matter

The selection of 25 small technology firms — not Lockheed Martin, not Raytheon, not the usual defense primes — is itself a statement. The traditional Pentagon procurement model funnels contracts to a handful of massive corporations, which then subcontract the actual innovation to smaller firms while skimming overhead. The result is slow, expensive, and optimized for shareholder returns rather than battlefield outcomes.

This program inverts that model. Small companies compete directly. The military evaluates directly. The timeline compresses from years to months. It's the kind of approach the private sector takes for granted, and the federal government treats as revolutionary.

Back in December, a department lead acknowledged that the U.S. military was spending at an "unaffordable" rate to fight the drone wars of the future. That admission — rarely heard from defense officials who treat every budget line as sacred — set the stage for a program built around cost discipline. At $5,000 per unit, these drones cost less than a single Javelin missile. The economics alone justify the urgency.

Executive Action Sets the Frame

The Drone Dominance Program didn't emerge from a vacuum. In June 2025, Trump signed a sweeping executive order designed to position the United States as a global drone superpower, with military expansion plans focused on keeping production domestic — Made in the USA.

That detail matters more than it might appear. China dominates global commercial drone manufacturing. DJI alone controls a staggering share of the consumer and commercial market. The national security implications of depending on Chinese-manufactured technology for military-adjacent applications have been obvious for years, yet previous administrations treated the problem as a talking point rather than a manufacturing priority.

The executive order and Hegseth's subsequent program tie defense procurement directly to domestic industrial capacity. Build it here. Test it here. Deploy it from here. The goal — assembling hundreds of thousands of drones by 2027 — is aggressive, but the infrastructure to reach it is now being constructed with real money and real timelines attached.

Speed as Strategy

The conventional criticism of Pentagon procurement has always centered on cost overruns and delays. The F-35 program, for all its eventual capability, became a punchline for a reason. But the deeper problem was never just money — it was time. By the time a weapons system survived the full acquisition gauntlet, the threat it was designed to counter had evolved, the technology had aged, and the taxpayer had funded a decade of PowerPoint presentations before a single unit reached a soldier's hands.

The Drone Dominance Program is structured as a direct repudiation of that model. Four phases. Evaluation by warfighters, not bureaucrats. Prototypes purchased and deployed within months. Competitive cycles that force continuous improvement rather than locking in a single design for a generation.

This is what happens when defense leadership treats lethality as the mission rather than as one consideration among dozens. The Pentagon has spent years layering objectives onto procurement — social goals, environmental mandates, supplier diversity metrics — until the actual purpose of the defense budget became secondary to the bureaucratic ecosystem it sustained. Hegseth's memo strips that back to first principles: buy what works, buy it fast, and don't let internal process become the enemy.

What Comes Next

The Gauntlet begins in less than two weeks. Twenty-five companies will demonstrate what they've built. Warfighters will put their hands on the equipment and render judgment. Twelve will advance. Thirty thousand drones will follow.

By 2027, if the timeline holds, the United States will possess a drone arsenal built not by defense conglomerates on cost-plus contracts but by small American companies competing on performance. The units will cost less than a decent used car. They will be produced at a scale that makes attrition irrelevant.

The battlefield has already changed. Ukraine proved that. The only question was whether the world's largest military could adapt before the next conflict demanded it. The answer is being assembled — one $5,000 drone at a time — at Fort Benning, Georgia.