US Army

The US Army is the largest branch of the United States Armed Forces, responsible for land warfare and the primary Pentagon customer driving drone and counter-drone procurement in 2025-2026. Its current operational footprint spans NATO's eastern flank (V Corps forward, Poznan), the Gulf (forces involved in the June 2026 Iran confrontation), and dozens of allied training programmes. Two procurement campaigns define its 2026 posture: a $20 billion, 10-year Lattice enterprise vehicle awarded to Anduril (March 2026) that consolidates 120-plus Counter-UAS actions under a single vendor, and the Drone Dominance one-way-attack programme targeting 300,000 FPV units by 2027 under a $1.1 billion budget.

On the eastern flank, Army V Corps ran Project Flytrap 5.0 at Pabrade, Lithuania on 9 June 2026, the first confirmed US Army operational test of a European autonomous strike drone: Helsing's HX-2 achieved 15 kills in 17 engagements in GPS-denied, EW-contested conditions. The FPV Drone Dominance Phase 1 closed roughly 10,000 units short of its 30,000 target (43% acceptance rate), prompting the Gauntlet Stage 1 qualifier (8-20 June) with compressed price caps of $4,500 (long-range) and $3,500 (urban) and an August 2026 Chinese-component Deadline for motors and batteries. On 6 July 2026, JIATF-401, the Army's counter-drone task force, awarded AeroVironment a second $500 million Domestic Shield IDIQ plus an $80.5 million Titan contract, following Perennial Autonomy's May Merops IDIQ, illustrating the Army's strategy of spreading awards across multiple vendors rather than consolidating around one prime.

Across topics the Army's exposure is wider than drones alone. An AH-64 Apache went down near the Strait of Hormuz on 9 June during the Iran confrontation, raising questions about rotary-wing vulnerability in contested airspace. The Army also owns US Patriot interceptor production scheduling: Camden, Arkansas builds roughly 650 PAC-3 rounds a year for all customers, a constraint that is shaping Gulf partner readiness from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia. These two threads connect the Army's procurement reform agenda to live operational risk in a way that no other US military branch currently spans.