Since this outlet reported on China's rare earth chokehold threatening U.S. drone production and Blue Origin's New Glenn explosion handing SpaceX a Pentagon launch monopoly, the drone story has moved — actual hardware is now reaching military hands, and NATO is trying to figure out how to shoot down the same category of weapons.

What's Actually Happening With Drone Deliveries

The Pentagon has begun accepting small, first-person view (FPV) one-way attack drones under its Gauntlet 1 competition, according to the program's official Leaderboard website tracked by Breaking Defense.

The numbers so far: 20,000 drones ordered across 10 of the top 11 Gauntlet vendors. Neros, maker of the Archer small quadcopter, is the clear frontrunner — all 2,400 of its ordered drones have been shipped, with 1,040 accepted by the military. The rest of the field has shipped a combined 560 drones, all still awaiting acceptance.

Of 20,000 drones on order, fewer than 1,600 have been shipped total. End of fiscal 2026 is September 30. That's less than four months away.

The Gap Nobody's Talking About

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued the "Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance" memo directing that every squad be outfitted with lethal small drones by the end of FY2026. The $1 billion two-year spending plan looks serious on paper.

But the original predicted order figure was 30,000 drones. The actual order came in at 20,000 — 10,000 short — because the third-place Gauntlet finisher, Napatree, has NOT yet been awarded a contract, according to Breaking Defense.

Hegseth's own memo acknowledged the problem plainly: "While global military drone production skyrocketed over the last three years, the previous administration deployed red tape. US units are not outfitted with the lethal small drones the modern battlefield requires."

Fair point on the red tape. The current pace of deliveries, however, raises questions about whether the fix is moving fast enough to meet the deadline Hegseth himself set.

Lessons From Ukraine — Being Applied Slowly

FPV drones have burned hundreds of armored vehicles on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war. This outlet covered Russia still fielding WWII-era T-54 tanks as recently as this week — those tanks are cheap drone kills. The U.S. military watched all of this and is now playing catch-up.

The Pentagon has also identified five companies — Bravo Ordnance, Kela Defense, Kraken Kinetics, Mountain Horse, and Northrop Grumman — to potentially provide payloads for Group 1 drones (those weighing 20 lbs. or less), per Breaking Defense. That's the lethality piece. Still theoretical for now.

A second Gauntlet competition is already being planned, this one focused on long-range strike and close-quarters tactical assault. According to the program's website, 49 companies have been asked to bring 79 unique drones to Camp Grayling, Michigan, for a qualifying event. The pipeline is expanding. But pipelines don't win fights — delivered, accepted, fielded weapons do.

NATO Is Trying to Shoot Down the Same Threat

While the U.S. races to build offensive small drones, NATO is separately racing to build a unified defense against them.

At a briefing in Brussels Wednesday, a Lockheed Martin UK-led consortium unveiled a Ground-Based Air Defense (GBAD) concept for the alliance, according to Breaking Defense. Partners include Leonardo, MBDA, and Spain's Indra. The overall NATO Modular GBAD program, launched in 2023 and valued at roughly €20 million ($23.3 million), is run by NATO's Support and Procurement Agency.

The core problem, as Richard Turner of Lockheed Martin UK explained it: NATO nations operate a patchwork of air defense systems — Patriot, SAMP/T, and others — that don't talk to each other seamlessly during joint deployments.

"There is no common thing currently, especially within GBAD, maybe apart from Link 16, that does connect the vast majority of NATO nations, where a nation with system A operating alongside another nation with system B can seamlessly operate and share data," Turner told reporters.

That's a significant admission. Eleven nations are participating — Romania, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK. The U.S. is an observer, not a full participant.

The Cheap-Sensor Problem

Indra's Ignacio Ojeda González-Posada made a point worth amplifying: integrating expensive high-end systems like IRIS-T into a shared network is relatively easy. The hard part is incorporating cheap, small anti-drone systems and acoustic detectors that typically operate in isolation and don't feed into a common tactical picture.

A $50,000 FPV drone can wreck a $10 million armored vehicle. The defense against it needs to be cheaper than the offense. Right now, NATO doesn't have a unified answer for the low-cost end of the threat spectrum.

The proposed solution is a software-based, plug-and-play architecture allowing member nations to connect different sensors to another nation's command nodes — similar in concept to what the U.S. is proposing under its Golden Dome missile defense initiative, according to González-Posada.

The Bottom Line

U.S. taxpayers are funding a $1 billion drone push. The goal is real and the urgency is legitimate — Ukraine proved small drones change battlefield math permanently. Yet 1,040 accepted drones against a goal of equipping every Army squad by September 30, 2026, is a long way from done.

And while the U.S. builds offensive drones, NATO's defensive network to counter the same threat category is still in concept phase, with a €20 million budget that wouldn't cover a week of Ukrainian front-line drone expenditure.

The threat is real. The spending is real. The delivery gap is real.