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Drone Dominance Gauntlet opens 8 June

1 min read

11:27UTC

The Pentagon's Drone Dominance Phase 2 Gauntlet Stage 1 runs from Monday 8 June to Saturday 20 June at Camp Grayling, Michigan, pitting startups, FPV racers and two Ukrainian firms against a programme a heritage prime now shapes.

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The Pentagon Drone Dominance Phase 2 Gauntlet Stage 1 opened on Monday 8 June at Camp Grayling, Michigan, running until Saturday 20 June ¹. The field includes FPV (first-person-view) racing veterans, two Ukrainian entrants, and the Phase 1 standouts Skycutter, which scored 99.3 out of 100, and Neros on 87.5. Phase 1 had made the programme look startup-only.

That picture changed when Northrop Grumman was selected to arm 200,000 FPV attack drones with a common payload by 2027 . The Gauntlet now runs inside an architecture a heritage prime helps define, even as hobbyists and small firms supply the airframes. Britain faces the same question in parallel, with BAE Systems, Tekever and Thales drawn into the Project NYX concept-demonstrator phase .

Early preferment compounds. The same dynamic put Anduril's Lattice at the centre of US counter-drone command and control; whoever holds the interface shapes everything built to it. Whether Phase 2 lets a startup, or a Ukrainian entrant, place against that backdrop is the open test Stage 1 begins to settle when it closes on 20 June.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The Pentagon is spending $1.1 billion to buy more than 300,000 attack drones by 2027. These are small aircraft that fly to a target and destroy themselves on impact, similar to what Ukraine and Russia have been using in the war. The Pentagon called its procurement programme Drone Dominance and is running a competitive fly-off to select suppliers. Phase 1 selected 11 vendors. Phase 2 is now underway, with Stage 1 running 8-20 June at Camp Grayling, a military training base in Michigan. Competitors include Phase 1 winner Skycutter, Phase 1 runner-up Neros, two Ukrainian firms, and FPV drone-racing specialists who have adapted their sport skills for military use. Northrop Grumman, a major traditional defence company, was separately chosen to design a standard warhead and fuze module that all the competing drones will need to carry.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources from United States and Netherlands

United States

Netherlands

Northrop Grumman's payload-standard role at roughly $5,000 per drone across the 200,000-unit initial tranche creates a minimum revenue floor of $1B for Northrop regardless of which vendors win the Phase 2 platform competition. This separates the heritage-prime revenue stream from the startup competition entirely: Northrop earns on volume, startups earn on selection.

The Camp Grayling venue signals the test conditions: Michigan National Guard facilities provide GPS-jamming, communications-denial, and electronic-warfare red-team environments that replicate contested Eastern European battlespace. Competitors that qualified in Phase 1 with fibre-optic control, including Skycutter, have an advantage in jammed environments that Phase 2 is designed to validate at scale.

Sources:Militarnyi·SEC / Red Cat Holdings·Unmanned Airspace

Mentions:Pentagon →Northrop Grumman →Project NYX →Michigan →Lattice →Tekever →Ukraine →Russia →Thales →BAE Systems →Anduril →Neros →Camp Grayling →Drone Dominance →Skycutter →

First Reported In

Update #11 · Ukraine starts exporting the factory

Militarnyi· 7 Jun 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Northrop banks two drone awards in one week

Northrop Grumman's payload selection (ID:3515) is the structural context for Phase 2 Gauntlet Stage 1 opening.

Occurred 18 May 2026

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UK launches Apache drone wingman trial

Project NYX's four-company concept-demonstrator phase (ID:3740) is the UK parallel to the US Phase 2 Gauntlet opening — both represent the heritage-prime vs startup question crystallising simultaneously.

Occurred 15 May 2026

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This Event

Drone Dominance Gauntlet opens 8 June

Phase 2 begins answering whether traditional primes crowd out the startups that defined the programme or simply absorb them.

Different Perspectives

Denmark (host nation)

Denmark accepted Fire Point's Skrydstrup plant after committing to bilateral defence co-production at the B9 Nordic summit in May; the facility sits beside a Danish F-35 base, sharing security perimeters. NATO has published no legal guidance on whether hosting Ukrainian weapons production converts Denmark into a co-belligerent, leaving the host-state obligation unresolved.

Russian Ministry of Defence

Russia's 117% YoY drone-output rise in April, accelerating from a 68% full-year 2025 baseline, validates the FPV mass-production doctrine and hands Moscow a cleaner targeting argument for the Skrydstrup plant than any hidden production line offered; a Ukrainian weapons facility on NATO sovereign territory is a legitimate military target under the laws of armed conflict.

Baltic NATO states (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania)

Latvia deployed mobile drone-intercept teams on 29 May using domestic Origin Robotics and Eraser interceptors, the first kinetic Baltic border response to Russia's 117% output surge. The Baltic states are the primary target market for Ukraine's ten EU export offices, giving them direct commercial access to combat-tested interceptors their own manufacturers have not yet matched.

Pentagon / Joint Interagency Task Force 401

Two Ukrainian entrants in Drone Dominance Phase 2 and Red Cat's SEC-filed STE partnership bring combat-iterated Ukrainian designs into US procurement without triggering Foreign Military Sale approvals; the programme's performance-scoring methodology does not require US-origin hardware. Northrop holding the Common UAS Payload standard means a heritage prime captures interface revenue regardless of which startup airframe wins.

Ukrainian defence industry (Fire Point / Spetstechnoexport)

Fire Point's Skrydstrup construction start and Spetstechnoexport's Red Cat partnership execute Zelensky's 13 May Bucharest proposal: converting wartime production surplus into a state export apparatus, independent of US approval chains. For Ukraine, embedded manufacturing on NATO soil protects propellant supply from Russian strikes while generating hard currency the war effort needs.

Chinese drone manufacturers (DJI, Autel)

Autel's Ralls Corp Fifth Amendment filing and DJI's Ninth Circuit quantification of USD 1.56 billion in 2026 losses are parallel constitutional attacks on a classified-evidence exclusion mechanism; neither company can contest the intelligence allegations directly, so both are betting on due-process doctrine to reopen the FCC authorisation route.