The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), the Pentagon's office for buying commercial technology, ranked the winners of Gauntlet II on 18 September1. Gauntlet II is the second round of the Pentagon's fly-off contest to pick suppliers of cheap attack drones. DIU named five vendors in each of two categories, deep strike and close-quarters work, and officials put orders at about 60,000 drones. The round had been cut to 19 finalists in July.
Neros, the only firm on both lists, announced a 14,000-drone order worth more than US$100m on 30 September2. In an earlier Pentagon attack-drone buy, only 43 per cent of the Archer drones Neros shipped cleared acceptance.
The first round's record sits underneath the new orders. Vendors had delivered 13,440 of the 22,320 drones ordered in Gauntlet I by 25 August, about 60 per cent, according to Inside Unmanned Systems as relayed by DroneXL3. Only three vendors delivered in full, one of them Ukrainian Defense Drones. The roughly 8,880 drones still undelivered from Gauntlet I are being moved to the firms that ship.
AeroVironment, which reported record full-year revenue of US$1.98bn in June, shows the same gap from the supplier's side. On 9 September it said its funded backlog, the value of signed and funded orders not yet delivered, reached a record US$1.5bn at 1 August, up 37 per cent on a year earlier4. First-quarter revenue rose 6 per cent, to US$480.5m.
