Pentagon holds startup contest, selecting suppliers for 300,000 attack drones

Washington (ANTARA) - The Pentagon plans to hold a contest for small businesses and startups to select suppliers for 300,000 small-scale attack drones, The Washington Post reported on Monday. The competition, which will run for 18 months, will vie for defence contracts worth $1.1 billion. These funds are expected to be sufficient to purchase hundreds of thousands of attack drones.

In next year’s defence budget draft, an allocation of $54.6 billion is listed to fund significantly expanded drone warfare units. The Pentagon estimates that the US military must purchase small drones in large quantities every year. The price per unit is approximately $5,000, and the systems are designed as single-use equipment, meaning losses on the battlefield are not considered critical to the budget.

Among the leading participants are the British company Skycutter and the US company Neros, which was founded by former drone racing champion Soren Monroe-Anderson. Neros has already collaborated with the US Army and Marine Corps. The Pentagon plans to narrow the list of participants to three to five main suppliers. To achieve this, the military is conducting a series of trials under conditions simulating combat missions. The first stage of the contest took place last February at Fort Benning, Georgia, with 26 companies invited. Participants were given two hours to train military pilots using their systems before the drones were tested in the field. Assigned tasks included hitting table-sized targets at distances of up to nine km and detonating explosives inside buildings.