Every long-range drone at Fort Carson went the distance. Operators at the Colorado post logged 1,858 sorties during the second Gauntlet of the Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program, spread across 23 drone models from 19 companies. Every one of the 11 models flown in the long-range evaluation reached 15 kilometers.
That last figure is the clearest sign of progress the program has published. In the first Gauntlet, only 24% of drones made it to 10 kilometers. The second round set a longer mark, and every long-range entrant cleared it.
The figures come from DefenseScoop reporter Jon Harper, whose Sept. 18, 2026 report on the Gauntlet 2 results quotes the department’s announcement: “flying 1,858 sorties across 23 platforms from 19 companies,” and “Each of the 11 platforms evaluated at long distance made it to 15 km.” Compared with Gauntlet 1, officials said in that announcement, the drones are “cheaper, more capable, and sourced from a supply chain more closely tied to the American industrial base.” That is the department’s own assessment of its vendors.
Two missions, two winners
Gauntlet 2 scored vendors in two mission areas: deep strike, the long-distance mission, and close quarters battle, the confined-space mission. DefenseScoop’s report lists the top five in each.
- Deep strike: Perennial Autonomy, Hyperscale, Neros, Skycutter, Swarm Defense Technologies
- Close quarters battle: Neros, ORQA US, XTEND Reality, Vector, ModalAI
Neros is the only company on both boards, first in close quarters and third in deep strike. Perennial Autonomy put out its own account of the win. The company’s Sept. 18, 2026 release says it scored 80.1 points overall in deep strike, a 9.2-point margin over second place, against 11 other providers in that category. Those are the company’s figures; the department’s announcement, as DefenseScoop reported it, gives rankings, not scores.
The path to Fort Carson was long. Perennial’s release says the qualifying phase drew 49 competitors at Camp Grayling, Michigan, and that companies advancing to Gauntlet II had to deliver 120 production-ready drones with lethality payloads.
Inside the evaluation at Fort Carson
The Army has published the clearest account of when and how the test ran. An Army article by Richelle Brown dated Sept. 11, 2026 says the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command took part in the evaluation “from Aug. 16 through Sept. 5, 2026.” It counts “about 40 Group 1 unmanned aircraft systems from 19 drone vendors,” along with five payload vendors, Army, Navy and industry partners.
Group 1 is the smallest class of military drone. AMCOM’s safety engineers, per the Army article, reviewed payload integration, communications, navigation, obstacle avoidance, operator workload and safeguards in both long-range strike and confined-environment scenarios. Kira Thomas, AMCOM Safety’s software system safety lead, described the split between the two teams on the range:
“While the operations teams were focused on performance, the safety team was focused on mitigations we could see during the tests.”
Dr. Laurence Mutuel, acting director of AMCOM’s Safety Office, made the point that a drone and its payload pass or fail together. “To be successful in the mission, you need both the drone to be successful in delivering the payload and the payload to be performing its role,” Mutuel said in the Army article. The Army says the joint Army-Navy safety team will keep collecting test data and build safety cases for board review.
What the Drone Dominance Program is buying
The program’s own site describes it as “an iterative $1 billion plan to purchase small, lethal drones over the next two years.” The Drone Dominance Program site says the effort is sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of War and run jointly by the Test Resource Management Center and the Defense Innovation Unit. DIU is led by Owen West, per DefenseScoop.
Each Gauntlet feeds orders. The program site records Gauntlet 1 as completed in February 2026 with 30,000 drones ordered. For the second round, DefenseScoop reported that the department plans to purchase about 60,000 drones from the Gauntlet 2 pool of vendors. The stated long-range goal, per the program site, is more than 200,000 drones by 2027.
The schedule is set. The program site lists Gauntlet 2.5, a bomber-platform mission, with an estimated October 2026 start, followed by Gauntlet 3 about six months after Gauntlet 2 and Gauntlet 4 about six months after that. Each round, on the program’s own terms, is another chance for vendors to prove range and reliability on a military range before the department places the next order.
Top image: A U.S. Army soldier with the 2nd Infantry Division handles a small first-person-view drone during a training course at Camp Humphreys, South Korea. Gauntlet 2 at Fort Carson is not shown. Image Credit: U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Tyler Wassmer — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.