For the Pentagon's drone push, the "factory is the weapon"
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The Gauntlet kicks off at Fort Benning, Georgia, this week.
- The trials run through early March, putting small, inexpensive drones and their makers through the wringer as the U.S. attempts to learn the lessons of war in Ukraine.
The big picture: The tests, announced earlier this month, are part of the Defense Department's Drone Dominance push, which seeks to arm American troops with hundreds of thousands of expendable drones in a few short years.
- Ukrainian troops have successfully used such weaponry to battle back a Russian invasion.
- The stateside initiative, though, is less about crowning the next aerial ace and more about identifying reliable supply chains and cost-effective factories.
- "They're very blunt about it at Drone Dominance: If you can't produce them and deliver them on time — if you're two weeks late — you're out," Red Cat CEO Jeff Thompson told Axios.
- "It's all about production. The factory is the weapon."
Catch up quick: The Defense Department on Feb. 3 named 25 companies as participants in the first Gauntlet. They include Dzyne Technologies, Firestorm Labs, Neros, Performance Drone Works, Red Cat's Teal Drones and Vector Defense.
- Roughly $150 million in prototype delivery orders will be placed at its conclusion.
Zoom out: The Pentagon expects to spend a little more than $1 billion on the program over the course of four increasingly competitive phases.
What they're saying: Drone Dominance is "creating a demand signal for industry" and motivating people to plan "their manufacturing processes at scale" rather than one-offs, Connor Toler, a Dzyne product manager, told Axios.
- A separate official said the initiative has the potential to shift supply chains and change "how the drone industry does business with the department."
By the numbers: Some 70-80% of casualties in the Russia-Ukraine war are caused by drones, according to a recent Latvian intelligence report. Kyiv alone is said to be using 9,000 drones per day, many of which are produced domestically.
- The U.S. is not ready to deploy or destroy cheap drones on that scale.
- Drone Dominance "is catching the U.S. up to where they perceive — and it's true — the Ukrainian market has been at for quite some time," Amol Parikh, the co-CEO at Doodle Labs, told Axios. (Doodle has a handful of customers in the cohort.)
- "There's structure to the program," he said. "There's structure to the fly-offs right from the outset and structure to how this thing will advance."
What we're watching: Whether Drone Dominance can distinguish itself from Replicator, the Biden-era push for unmanned mass to counter China, which critics say failed to meaningfully move the ball forward.
Go deeper: RTX downs drone swarms at Army trials
