The Pentagon’s Counter-UAS Marketplace has generated $13 million in purchases since its launch earlier this year, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told a House Defense Appropriations subcommittee last week — and the platform is now accessible to state and local law enforcement agencies, not just federal buyers.

Joint Interagency Task Force 401, which administers the marketplace, confirmed purchases have gone to the military’s southern border task force, U.S. Central Command, and individual services with homeland defense missions. The catalog launched with more than 1,600 items including low-collateral defeat systems, sensors, radars, and electronic warfare platforms, and is described as expanding. A dozen complete C-UAS systems are currently listed.

The state and local access dimension gives the marketplace a wider procurement footprint than its initial framing suggested. Driscoll said Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall has hosted 350 state and local police departments in counter-drone coordination efforts and that the Army is integrating them into JIATF-401’s broader picture. “Very crucially, everyone on the site is basically agreeing to try to use the same sight picture to monitor the drones,” Driscoll said. “One of the problems is they cross so many jurisdictions — you need to be able to have everybody see the same thing and react.”

The hearing also produced the clearest public cost data yet on the Merops interceptor program. Driscoll confirmed the Army purchased 13,000 Merops units at approximately $15,000 each in the opening days of the Iran conflict — a figure he described as favorable against Iranian Shahed drones that he estimated at up to three times that cost. “Which is amazing because that puts us on the right end of the cost curve,” Driscoll said, adding that the Army expects Merops unit costs to decline as production scales.

JIATF-401 has separately committed $100 million for counter-drone security at FIFA World Cup events this summer, covering mobile C-UAS technologies across 11 cities in nine states. Upcoming high-profile events including the America 250 celebrations and the 2028 Summer Olympics are driving what Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, described as a structural shift in domestic air security requirements. “It used to be that we just did the Super Bowl once a year with that kind of cap,” Karako told DefenseScoop. “But we need lots of Super Bowl-style bubbles over lots of things all year round.”