The Pentagon Drone Dominance Phase 2 Gauntlet Stage 1 opened on Monday 8 June at Camp Grayling, Michigan, running until Saturday 20 June1. 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.
