The Pentagon’s new $1 billion Drone Dominance Program (DDP) aims to rapidly field hundreds of thousands of low-cost, expendable attack drones over the next two years, according to Howard Altman of The War Zone. The plan calls for buying about 340,000 small drones by early 2028, treating them like consumable munitions. Vendors will compete in multi-phase challenges to drive costs down and performance up, with early phases beginning in 2026. The initiative is meant to fix the military’s slow adoption of lower-end drones and build a large, resilient US drone industrial base.
The Pentagon has created a new program to spend $1 billion over the next two years to buy hundreds of thousands of one-way attack drones for the military. Dubbed the Drone Dominance Program (DDP), it is an implementation of War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s July memo authorizing major changes to how the department procures and uses these weapons. You can read more about the Pentagon vision for how lower-end drones will be procured and employed across even the smallest units under this new strategy in our initial story here.
As we have frequently reported, despite the lessons learned from Ukraine and many other battlegrounds, the U.S. military has continued to move extremely slowly to field lower-end drones on a widespread basis. This is the latest Pentagon move to change that, albeit with still relatively conservative goals compared to the millions of drones used by Ukraine and Russia.
“Through the drone dominance program, $1 billion from the Big Beautiful Bill will fund the manufacture of approximately 340,000 small UASs for combat units over the course of two years,” according to the Pentagon announcement. We’ve reached out for additional details. […]
After the first phase of the competition is completed, up to 12 vendors will be issued fixed-price orders of at least 1,000 drones. Payment for the drones is made at each delivery. […]
Overall this is an extremely important issue, one that has been festering without conclusive forward progress for years. The fact that the DoW is committing to building up the industrial base and its understanding of mass drone procurement and deployment is a positive step in the right direction.
Read more here.
