AriQuest

03/07/2026

"30,000 drones. $150M. Orders dropping this week.

The Pentagon's Drone Dominance Program just finished the Gauntlet.

Owen West confirmed it at yesterday's Senate Armed Services hearing. 25 vendors competed in live-fly evaluations at Fort Moore. Military operators flew and scored every system. Up to 12 winners get firm fixed-price production orders within days.

The numbers.

• 30,000 one-way attack drones in the first tranche
• ~$5,000 per unit target price
• Delivery to 17 operational units within five months
• $1.1B total program budget through 2027-2028

This isn't a prototype phase. These are production orders going straight to warfighters.

The scale-up is already mapped.

Phase 2+ runs three more Gauntlets through 2027. Vendor pool drops to 5. Quantity scales to 150,000+ per phase. Price target drops to $2,300/unit. Final goal: 300,000-340,000 attritable drones fielded."

03/03/2026

This tender/RFI was put out by the Army last week.

"Executive Summary: Strategic Partnerships to Mobilize Private Capital for Army Priorities

The U.S. Army cannot rely solely on annual congressional appropriations to solve its critical modernization requirements. We must unlock the overwhelming advantage resident in American industry and capital markets by deploying private-sector financing and expertise against the Army’s longstanding challenges and projects critical to Army priorities, including: (1) Energy Resilience and Dominance; (2) Organic Industrial Base; (3) Strengthening Logistics and Supply Chains; (4) Real Assets and Facilities Utilization; (5) Advanced Manufacturing & Technology Adoption; and (6) Critical Minerals and Resource Development.

Therefore, the Army invites leaders from the finance, technology, and industrial sectors to co-create a new public-private partnership frontier centered around capital markets to unlock the full potential of the Army’s vast enterprise. We expect that the most compelling responses will present a clear path to a diversified customer base across commercial and government markets and in which the Army could potentially act as a stable, long-term partner or anchor customer to de-risk the initial investment and help to scale the enterprise. Responses should be commercially viable and self-sustaining and not reliant on the Army (i.e., appropriated funds) as the sole source of return on investment."

Source: SAM

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