Fort Carson

Fort Carson, a roughly 137,000-acre US Army POST near Colorado Springs and home of the 4th Infantry Division, is set to host the Pentagon's Gauntlet II live-fire test in August 2026. The 19 finalist companies that survived the programme's Camp Grayling elimination round each have about five weeks to build 120 lethality-payload drones before the demonstration.

Established in 1942 as Camp Carson and made permanent after The Second World War, the POST has long served as a major manoeuvre and training ground given Colorado's varied terrain and altitude. Its selection for Gauntlet II's live-fire puts a decades-old training base at the centre of the Pentagon's newest drone procurement competition.

The stakes are large: officials expect to order 50,000 to 60,000 additional drones from whichever companies perform best at Fort Carson, turning what has traditionally been a routine training venue into the proving ground for a mass drone procurement decision.