Neros Sweeps Pentagon's Drone Gauntlet II Ahead of a 60,000-Drone Order

Neros Technologies won close-quarters battle at the Pentagon's second Drone Dominance gauntlet with 88.1 points. It also took third in deep strike, at 69.8. No other company placed on both leaderboards.

The Drone Dominance Program (DDP), run by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) inside the Department of War, plans to order 60,000 one-way attack drones from the top performers of Gauntlet II. The winner of each mission area is in line for 8,000 units. The runner-up, 7,000. The program still calls all ten firms finalists, and it says awards are not guaranteed.

That distance — from a leaderboard to a signed contract — is the whole story here. Gauntlet II ran at Fort Carson, Colorado, in August, across roughly 40 armed Group 1 drones from 19 manufacturers. Deep strike was flown at a 15-kilometer stand-off. Close-quarters battle was fought inside two kilometers, in buildings, tunnels, trenches and bunkers.

What the second gauntlet measured

Gauntlet I, held earlier this year, asked a simpler question: can the drone fly the course and hit the target? Gauntlet II added the conditions that break cheap airframes in the field — night runs, controlled kinetic engagement, and electronic-warfare lanes flown against counter-UAS systems. The final score combined event performance, evaluations by military operators, and demonstrated production and supply-chain capability.

Electronic warfare is the filter that reordered the field. Skycutter, the winner of Gauntlet I, scored 99.3 at Fort Benning in March. On the harder Fort Carson course it scored 66.6 and fell to fourth. A competitor that had taken a Gauntlet I production order — and, by the program's own tracker, shipped none of it four months later — now sits behind a field it used to lead.

The economics of 60,000 drones

The DDP is not buying one exquisite system. It is buying inventory — cheap, attritable airframes at a volume the U.S. industrial base has not produced in decades. Gauntlet II is valued at $300 million, part of a contest the program has described at roughly $1.1 billion, with a stated goal of fielding more than 200,000 small unmanned systems by 2027.

That framing flips the usual defence-technology economics. A traditional program rewards the lowest-risk bid and then locks in a decade of cost-plus work. A gauntlet rewards whoever can build a good-enough drone fastest, at a unit cost low enough to be lost in combat without a procurement review. Production and supply-chain capability are scored alongside flight performance, which tells you where the program believes its real bottleneck sits.

Drone Dominance Program results, March and August 2026

The table is the argument. Between March and August, the same competition changed what "good" means. A high score on a benign day course stopped predicting a high score under jamming and night flight. For a buyer, that is the point — the program is testing for the failure modes that a peacetime demonstration hides.

The number the leaderboard does not show

Sixty thousand drones is the headline. It is also the smaller half of the program's own ambition: the stated goal is more than 200,000 small unmanned systems by 2027. Gauntlet II selects suppliers for the first tranche, not the last. If the program holds that trajectory, the vendors winning today are being chosen for a pipeline roughly three times their current order.

Unit cost is the variable nobody on the leaderboard publishes. A one-way attack drone is designed to be expended, so the economics only work if the airframe, the seeker and the datalink are cheap enough to replace at scale. Production and supply-chain capability carry scoring weight for that reason. A superior airframe that depends on a single supplier for a jam-resistant radio is a supply risk wearing a winner's badge.

The jamming lanes point at the same constraint. Electronic warfare does not attack the drone; it attacks the link between the drone and its operator. Resilience there is a components problem as much as a software one, and it is the layer most exposed to a handful of specialised suppliers. Read the Gauntlet II leaderboard as a list of integrators, and the concentration risk sits one tier below them.

Who captures the value

Of the ten finalists, only one is publicly traded: XTEND, which listed on the NYSE this month. As we wrote in September, XTEND's $1.5B NYSE debut tested whether public markets would pay for software-defined defence. The Gauntlet II result sharpens that test. A leaderboard place is not revenue, and the program has said awards are not guaranteed.

For private investors, the signal runs elsewhere. Neros and Perennial Autonomy are private. So the near-term financial exposure to a 60,000-drone order sits mostly with component suppliers and contract manufacturers — seekers, airframes, radios, batteries — rather than with the platform names at the top of the board. Perennial Autonomy, the deep-strike winner at 80.1 points, is backed by Eric Schmidt, which gives it a balance sheet most of its peers lack.

The primes are the quieter story. A gauntlet that rewards volume and speed compresses the advantage of an incumbent integrator. The program is effectively creating a second supply tier for one-way attack drones, and it is awarding that tier to companies that did not exist a decade ago.

Will the 60,000-drone order actually ship?

Development scenarios

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