"What was happening is we had this highly distributed drone sort of purchasing that all happened in small blocks, all in about the department, which has some goodness to that, because units can experiment on their own. But they had to buy from this small Blue List that never grew. Very hard for a vendor to get on that blue list," Emil Michael, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, told attendees at SOF Week.
Camp Atterbury demonstration: LUCAS and the FLM-136 in action
At Camp Atterbury, Indiana, a windowless operations center filled with defense officials, soldiers, drone makers and reporters watched a LUCAS drone appear on a screen, move "at rocket speed" and demonstrate a new low-level capability before crashing through a cement structure on the test range. The FLM-136’s quick evolution was presented as a vivid example of what Pentagon leaders want to accelerate with the $50 billion the department has requested this year for drone development and production.
Defense Autonomous Warfare Group’s $50 billion plan and the Blue List change
James Mazol, deputy to Michael, described how the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group intends to spend the $50 billion—an amount the article notes is "more than 200 times its 2026 budget and more than the GDP of many nations." Mazol said, "Some of it is actually buying platforms en masse. Now there's a lot of actual platforms that can be part of that, that exist and just need to be scaled up"—signaling both big buys of existing systems and funding to scale production.
Michael and his team have already expanded the roster of drones that unit commanders can more easily buy, loosening previous constraints imposed by what Michael called a small, static "Blue List" that made it hard for vendors to sell into the force. The approach blends bulk procurement for established platforms with programs to bring new companies into production.
T-REX and Gauntlet 1: Ukrainian startups and rapid prototyping
The March Gauntlet 1 phase of the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance trials and the T-REX technology readiness experiment highlighted how rapid prototyping events are surfacing agile vendors. Top performers included Ukrainian Defense Drones and a partnership of Ukraine’s SkyFall and a UK company—examples of startups that moved from fielding to potential Pentagon orders.
The T-REX events, one of a series of rapid joint-service prototyping efforts begun in 2023, also introduced smaller firms such as SplashOne Robotics. SplashOne displayed a quadcopter that fires on other drones using autonomous targeting software called Gunner; founder Jeff Wright said they "have game" against a variety of Russian one-way-attackers, naming the SuperCam 350, Orlan10, Molynia and even the Geran-2.
SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command and the emphasis on data architectures
U.S. Southern Command has stood up an autonomous-warfare unit—SOUTHCOM Autonomous Warfare Command, or SAWC—whose initial focus, Gen. Frank Donovan said, is "building a data network to enable more effective use of drones." Donovan warned, "We don't talk about robots at SAWC. We talk about the data environment, the different data layers that we need at the very forward edge so our [special operations forces] and our conventional force teammates…can actually plug into that data network."
Donovan pressed for open architectures rather than single-vendor stacks: "We can match the robots to the environment. Whether it swims, it flies, it has feet, whatever it does, we have to make it do what we want it to do when we want to do it." He was equally blunt to vendors: "If it’s great only if you use it this way, only if you use my service stack, and only if you connect it to this or that, it’s unacceptable across the board."
What this means for vendors, unit commanders, and the Navy
- Vendors: Companies will be pushed to demonstrate open connectivity and data-sharing as a condition of wider procurement—Donovan’s insistence on open architectures makes closed service stacks a likely barrier to large Pentagon purchases.
- Unit commanders and procuring authorities: The expanded Blue List and the push to buy "platforms en masse" means commanders may gain faster access to off-the-shelf systems and scale existing capabilities quickly, rather than rely solely on small, distributed buys.
- The Navy and maritime forces: Mazol cited Saronic, an autonomous surface vessel maker, as a model—"They have an unmanned surface vessel that has gone through…all this experimentation. They've built this body of evidence. And, you know, they're helping the Navy procure that in large quantities"—showing how sea-based unmanned systems are part of the procurement calculus.
The Pentagon’s plan pairs fast-moving demonstrations and startup fielding with an unusually large funding request. The mix is explicit: buy more of what already works, scale production, and groom nimble new entrants whose battle-tested systems—some developed or proven alongside Ukrainian partners—can be folded into U.S. orders. The hard constraint running through every stage, from Camp Atterbury to SOUTHCOM, is interoperability: the department’s leaders are prepared to spend at scale, but insist that systems connect on the data level or risk being excluded from wider use.
Original reporting: Defense One — How the Pentagon plans to spend $50 billion on drone warfare
