Program leadership laid out the structure, quantities, and competitive logic of Phase II at XPONENTIAL—and spent an hour in open Q&A addressing the tensions the industry has been waiting to air.
The Drone Dominance Program’s first Gauntlet established that the domestic one-way attack drone industry exists, can compete, and can deliver. Phase II is asking a harder set of questions: Can it deliver at volume, under electronic warfare, in both extended-range and close-quarters environments, with non-Chinese batteries and motors—and on a timeline measured in weeks, not months?
LTC Leo Burkardt of the Test Resource Management Center, the Drone Dominance Program’s point of contact for the test and evaluation architecture at XPONENTIAL, laid out the Phase II structure in an open industry session and then fielded questions for an extended period. The exchange surfaced the tensions the industry has been waiting to raise: the industrial base logic behind the three-to-five vendor award structure, the gap between standardization and innovation, the spectrum problem limiting realistic EW testing, and the difference between what the program requires and what it rewards.
Two Mission Tracks, Three Stages
Phase II splits into two distinct mission areas that vendors can enter independently or together. Mission Area A—Long Range Strikes—tasks platforms with Find, Fix, Finish at approximately 20 kilometers in communications- and GNSS-degraded or denied environments. Man-packability is desired but not required. Mission Area B—Tactical Assault in Close Quarters—covers Find, Fix, Finish at under two kilometers in urban and confined environments including building interiors, trenches, bunkers, and heavy vegetation. Mission B platforms must be man-packable, preferably multiple per person. Both tracks share the same core performance requirements: all-weather, all-lighting operation, and demonstrated resilience to RF jamming and GNSS denial in what the program calls a dirty electromagnetic environment.
The competitive structure is organized in three stages. Stage 1 is the Qualifier, scheduled for June, with a goal of identifying approximately 18 top-performing systems. Vendor pilots fly the evaluation; approximately 20 drones are required; and performance in contested electromagnetic environments—EW and GNSS denial—is explicitly identified as a key differentiator rather than a secondary consideration. Stage 1 runs at vendor expense.
Stage 2 is the Production and Delivery Test, which is a mandatory pass/fail gate. Vendors that advance from the Qualifier receive a firm fixed-price order and must deliver 120 one-way attack air vehicles—NDAA-compliant with non-Chinese batteries and motors—along with 20 night vision systems, 30 trainer munitions, 20 lethal munitions ready for explosive integration, and 8 sets of durable system components including ground control stations, communications infrastructure, operator interfaces, and any supporting ISR or relay drones. Full delivery is required no later than two weeks before Gauntlet II. Late or incomplete orders are rejected and result in disqualification.
Stage 3, Gauntlet II itself, is scheduled for August. Warfighters, not vendor pilots, fly the scenarios. The evaluation design is scenario-based and dynamic rather than scripted, with scenarios developed by warfighters. Four days of training precede the event, approximately one week out. Production OTA awards follow: approximately five vendors in Mission Area A and three in Mission Area B. Minimum order is estimated at 4,000 drones, with the highest-ranked performer receiving the largest allocation.
The Numbers Behind the Competition
The projected order quantities make the stakes concrete. Mission Area A orders range from 8,500 drones for first place to 4,000 for fifth, at a target price of $5,500 per drone—a total estimated award of approximately $167 million across the five winners. Mission Area B runs 9,500 drones for first to 7,500 for third at $4,500 per drone, totaling approximately $115 million across three winners. Across both tracks, the program is projecting roughly 56,000 drones delivered from eight vendors. All quantities and prices are estimates subject to finalization in the Request for Solutions.
The delivery mix adds specificity that the headline quantities don’t capture. Forty percent of delivered air vehicles must be integrated with live munitions; twenty percent with reusable trainer munitions. Twenty percent must include night vision systems. Vendors offering fiber-optic tether solutions deliver ten percent with fiber, but all fiber-equipped drones are also required to have an alternate communications solution—the program explicitly does not want single-point comms dependency. Spares are required at five percent across self-identified common failure components: batteries, chargers, propellers.
Why Three to Five Vendors, Not One—and Not Thirty
The single most discussed topic in the Q&A was the award structure. The question from industry was direct: if the program wants to build a defense industrial base, why are only three to five vendors per mission getting contracts?
The response framed the choice as a balance between two competing pressures. On one side is the industrial base development goal. On the other is the logistical burden on the warfighter—training, manuals, school house protocols, parts compatibility—which scales with the number of different systems in the field. The previous DoD model had gone too far in the other direction: a single competition, a single winner, a $20 billion sole-source contract for a decade. “I’m not doing that,” Burkardt said. “I’m doing a competition every six months, and I’m awarding three to five per mission. So now I’ve got three missions…in my mind, that’s nine to fifteen companies that will now get funding.”
He also pushed back on the premise that winning a prime contract is the only path. The 45-day iteration cycle that characterizes operational drone development—the pace at which requirements change based on battlefield feedback—makes vertical integration impractical at that tempo. “If you think you’re going to have the best transmitter, it’ll be the best transmitter tomorrow, and it’ll be the next best transmitter day after, and you’re just not going to keep up that internal R&D.” The advice to companies that do not win prime awards was to become suppliers. “If you’ve got the best widget, think about being a supplier for that widget to those nine to fifteen [winners].”
The Discriminators: What Separates Winners from Qualifiers
The program was clear that basic manually-piloted FPV capability is the floor, not the ceiling. Three categories of capability are identified as potential discriminators that, even demonstrated individually, are likely to provide a meaningful competitive edge.
Advanced Target Engagement covers automated target recognition and robust pixel lock—the ability to engage multiple moving and stationary targets in rapid succession with less operator workload. Autonomous Behaviors covers complex task execution with minimal operator input, including autonomous area search and navigation in GNSS-denied environments. Force Multiplication covers multi-drone control—one operator directing multiple drones simultaneously for coordinated strike effects. These are not required; they are not scored as pass/fail. But the program’s framing is explicit: in a contested electromagnetic environment where FPV control itself may be degraded, platforms with autonomous fallback capability and reduced operator cognitive load will perform differently than those without.
The program also opened the door, without committing to it, to more unconventional configurations. Relay drones, support drones, and marsupial configurations—a carrier platform that deploys one-way attack drones at range—are all considered acceptable within the system package at a 20-to-1 consumable-to-recoverable ratio. A mission autonomy prize challenge is expected in September for companies with relevant capabilities they want to demonstrate outside the main competitive structure.
The Open Problems: Spectrum, GCS, Batteries, Fiber
Four specific tensions came up in the Q&A that are worth noting for what they reveal about where the program sees friction.
Spectrum and range testing: The program is aware that both government and commercial test ranges face significant constraints on the spectrum emissions—frequency-hopping radios, jamming systems—required to run realistic EW testing. Coordinating with the FAA and FCC each time is slow. Work is underway to develop streamlined permissions, but no near-term resolution was offered. Companies should expect that range access for realistic EW testing will remain constrained.
GCS standardization: The question of whether the program would push toward a standardized ground control station—or run a GCS-specific prize challenge—came up directly. The response was that standardization has real advantages for the warfighter but risks constraining innovation from vendors. No decision has been made; the program is tracking industry input. Vendors should not design to an assumed GCS standard that does not yet exist.
Battery standards: An attendee raised the need for standardized battery sizes and connectors to support the supply chain at scale. The response was revealing: the program explicitly does not want to set those standards, citing the risk of locking in the wrong spec. “I don’t want to be in the business of setting standards, because I’ll get it wrong, or I’ll get it right for now and be outdated in two years.” The program wants industry to self-organize around standards, and indicated it would help facilitate those connections through industry days and the supply chain ecosystem—but stopped short of committing to a specific mechanism.
Fiber supply chain: A vendor raised the fiber-optic tether supply chain concern explicitly—if 300,000 drones are eventually delivered with only 10 percent fiber integration, the domestic fiber supply chain cannot reach the scale needed to be competitive. The response clarified that the 10 percent fiber delivery specification applies only to vendors that choose to offer a fiber solution; fiber is not required. The program acknowledged the cost differential between sourcing fiber from different countries ($100 versus $1,000 per spool) and the supply chain fragility that creates, but offered no resolution. “I don’t have a clean answer for you right now.”
The 60 Percent Solution
The session’s clearest statement of program philosophy came in response to a question about the pace of change. The 45-day iteration cycle—the rate at which requirements change based on operational feedback—creates obvious tension with production planning, supply chain development, and vendor investment cycles. The program’s answer was essentially that imperfect and fast is preferred to perfect and late. “We were happy to get the 60 percent solution to figure out the rest later.”
That framing extends to the industrial base itself. The program acknowledges it is pushing industry into territory it was not ready for—production at scale, supply chain traceability, non-Chinese components—on a timeline the industry did not anticipate. The response is not to slow down but to be explicit about where the friction is, communicate requirements in advance, and accept that the build will be messy. Industry days, the program email at OSW-dronedominance@mail.mil, and the dronedominance.mil website are the primary channels for ongoing feedback. A second industry day, with higher capacity than the April event that filled quickly, is likely but not yet confirmed.
