The Pentagon's 19 Gauntlet II finalists will gather at Fort Carson, Colorado in August, each given about five weeks to build 120 lethality-payload drones. Gauntlet II is the US military's competitive drone build-off, run to find suppliers who can manufacture attack drones at wartime rates rather than merely demonstrate a good prototype. Fort Carson, a US Army installation, hosts the sprint that turns the contest from paper claims into hardware on a bench.
Defence officials expect to order 50,000 to 60,000 more drones from the top performers, plural. That plural is the operative word. The field was cut to 19 firms on 2 July, and spreading a 50,000-unit order across several of them rather than a single champion is the clearest operational expression of the distributed-award pattern running through the week's contracts. The buyers want many suppliers who can produce at rate, and the sprint is how they find out who actually can.
The rules carry forward from earlier stages. Gauntlet Stage 1 tested 49 companies and set a bar on Chinese-sourced motors and batteries, a supply-chain condition the Fort Carson finalists must still meet. The programme opened at Camp Grayling on 8 June, so the August sprint is the next gate in a contest designed from the start to reward manufacturing depth over a single clever design.
