Pentagon Names 25 Vendors for Drone Dominance Gauntlet at Fort Benning

The Department of Defense named 25 vendors to compete in Phase I of the Drone Dominance Program, an evaluation the Pentagon has dubbed "the Gauntlet." Testing will take place at Fort Benning, Georgia, beginning Feb. 18, 2026 and run into early March, after which the Pentagon plans to place roughly $150 million in prototype delivery orders to arrive over the following five months.

DefenseScoop published the full roster of companies invited to the Gauntlet: Anno.Ai, Ascent AeroSystems, Auterion, DZYNE Technologies, Ewing Aerospace, Farage Precision, Firestorm Labs, General Cherry, GreenSight, Griffon Aerospace, HALO Aeronautics, Kratos SRE, ModalAI, Napatree Technology, Neros Technologies, OKSI, Paladin Defense Services, Performance Drone Works, Responsibly, Swarm Defense, Teal Drones, Ukrainian Defense Drones Tech Corp, Vector Defense, W.S. Darley & Co., and XTEND. The lineup mixes established defense suppliers and smaller startups, a composition DefenseScoop described as including "known and relatively unknown companies."

During the Gauntlet, military drone operators will fly and evaluate each vendor's systems, and the results will determine which platforms receive prototype contracts. After the testing window closes in early March, the DoD will issue prototype delivery orders worth about $150 million, with deliveries expected through roughly August 2026. Defense News has previously cited the Pentagon's December acquisition plan that envisions successive phases: 12 vendors producing 30,000 drones at $5,000 per unit, then scaling to 150,000 drones at $2,300 per unit as vendor counts narrow to five. The Pentagon emphasized that competitive cycles will be "measured in months, not years."

The inclusion of Performance Drone Works, identified as an offshoot of the Drone Racing League, spotlights a direct pipeline from FPV racing to defense contracting. Business Insider also flagged Kratos SRE as a Kratos Defense subsidiary and noted two Ukraine-based firms on the roster, Ukrainian Defense Drones Tech Corp and General Cherry, characterized as experienced builders of FPV one-way attack drones for the Ukrainian military. DefenseScoop added that Ukrainian vendors have faced sluggish bureaucracy when selling to Western countries, raising questions about logistics and export approvals if those firms advance in procurement rounds.

The Gauntlet sits against a broader Pentagon push to modernize acquisition and experiment with artificial intelligence. Fedweek quoted the department calling the current innovation ecosystem "a tangle of overlapping organizations and confused authority – workarounds built to bypass now-obsolete systems," and described an AI Acceleration Strategy aimed to "cut bureaucratic barriers, speed experimentation, and make the military an 'AI-first' fighting force." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has framed one-way attack drones as a cost-effective alternative to high-end munitions, underscoring the program's economic rationale.

For the drone-racing community and the wider unmanned aerial systems industry, the Gauntlet accelerates the marriage of sport-grade FPV skills and military demand. Pilots and builders who sharpened reflexes around gates and timing systems now see a pathway into a procurement pipeline that could scale to hundreds of thousands of airframes by 2027, according to reported program ambitions. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment about how many companies submitted proposals or other Gauntlet specifics, leaving open logistics and selection mechanics. What follows is a compressed, high-stakes season for vendors: perform at Fort Benning and the field opens to prototype orders and rapid iterative competitions that aim to move from lab to deployment at unprecedented speed.