The Pentagon plans to begin delivering batches of small drones to roughly 17 military units this month. Officials are preparing to integrate the systems into realistic training exercises.
During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing March 5, a senior defense official outlined the timeline for initial deliveries and procurement under the Defense Department’s (DOD) Drone Dominance Program (DDP).
Under the Trump administration, the DOD was rebranded to the War Department.
“In the short term, we will be delivering drones starting this month, to roughly 17 different military units, and there is a plan in place across each of those for those drones to be used in realistic training exercises,” said Drone Dominance Program Manager Travis Metz.
The drone purchases are part of the Pentagon’s $1.1 billion DDP, launched in late 2025 with the goal of purchasing and equipping U.S. forces with more than 300,000 domestically produced, weaponized small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) by 2028. The initiative is designed to accelerate the fielding of commercially developed drone technology through a series of competitive procurement cycles that test vendor systems under operational conditions.
Metz said the Pentagon intends for most of the systems purchased in the near term to be used primarily in live training exercises by the Army and Marine Corps, though they could also be deployed operationally if requested by military leadership.
“In the long term, those same military service departments will be developing their own tactics, techniques, and procedures, and other doctrine to be able to sustain the drones,” Metz said. “We don’t expect them to sit on the shelf for very long.”
DDP’s four phases of competitions
The program is organized around four phases of competition in which commercial systems are evaluated. On Feb. 3, 2026, the DOD announced the 25 vendors invited to compete in Phase I.
The Phase I evaluation – known as “the Gauntlet” – began Feb. 18 at Fort Benning, Ga., where military operators flew and evaluated vendor drone systems.
Metz told lawmakers the initial competition concluded March 1 and that the department plans to begin selecting vendors and issuing orders in the coming days.
According to Metz, the Pentagon “expects to place approximately $150 million in prototype delivery orders among roughly a dozen companies.”
“The winners will be given orders for a total of 30,000 small one-way attack drones, which will be delivered to military units over the next five months,” Metz said.
He further explained that the DOD plans to run the three additional procurement cycles of DDP on a six-month schedule each.
“Each subsequent phase will increase the number of units purchased and decrease the maximum vendors receiving orders, from 12 vendors in Phase I to approximately three to five vendors in Phase IV,” Metz said, adding that he also expects unit costs to decline as production scales.
According to Metz, under the program’s structure, later competition phases will also include more demanding mission tests as the military evaluates how the drones perform in increasingly complex operational scenarios.