By: Dawn Zoldi, Col. USAF Ret.
As the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium kicks off this week in Aurora, Colorado, you may find uncrewed systems, autonomy and counter‑UAS at the center of nearly every conversation about future airpower. This article provides critical background for those discussions by tracing the rapid cascade of executive actions, Pentagon directives and a new law which have elevated drones and autonomous systems from supporting actors to core considerations in U.S. warfighting, deterrence and homeland defense.
An Executive Order That Treats Drones as Infrastructure
The pivot started at the top in June 2025 with Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” which reframed drones as strategic infrastructure.
The order directs federal agencies to build a “strong and secure domestic drone sector,” with a clear preference for U.S.‑manufactured systems and components. It pushes the government to scale domestic production, expand testing and clear regulatory pathways so drones can operate routinely in the National Airspace System (DOT), with leadership from the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration.
The order also leans on and expands the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS framework. It directs the Department of War to treat pre‑vetted platforms differently on ranges and in training and to grow that list of compliant systems. At the same time, it nudges the FAA toward updated rules for advanced operations, like beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) that are essential if commercial, public‑safety and defense demand are all going to ride on the same broad technology base.
For airpower professionals, this policy also provides the backdrop for discussions about integrating massed drones alongside exquisite crewed aircraft, and for how national airspace decisions will shape training and test ranges.
Inside the Memo to “Unleash” Military Drone Power
Another order from the White House targeted change behavior inside the Pentagon on the topic of drones. The July 2025 memorandum, “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance” translates executive‑level vision into explicit marching orders for the services.
The memo calls out internal bureaucratic friction, such as over‑cautious certification pathways, fragmented test policies and slow acquisition, as a direct threat to lethality and deterrence. It sets aggressive timelines for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps to:
- Stand up experimental formations focused on small UAS.
- Normalize the use of small drones across combat training, not just specialized units.
- Streamline acquisition and fielding for vetted U.S. systems, particularly those on Blue‑style lists.
The memo explicitly links this push for remotely piloted aircraft to AI‑enabled and networked systems in anticipation of swarming behaviors, onboard autonomy and more sophisticated human‑machine teaming at the tactical edge. These same ideas animate Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and next‑generation air dominance debates.
Drone Dominance: A $1B Gauntlet for Industry
Policy signals remain important, but the real gravitational pull for any tech shows up in demand signals. The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance program provides that demand signal.
Announced at the end of 2025, Drone Dominance is a roughly $1 billion, multi‑year effort to buy hundreds of thousands of small UAS, primarily low‑cost, one‑way‑attack systems, through a series of competitive “gauntlets.” Over four phases, the department aims to acquire on the order of 300,000–340,000 drones by 2028. The program aims to steadily drive down unit costs as volume ramps up. The Phase I blueprint involves:
- About 30,000 drones delivered between early 2026 and mid‑year.
- Roughly a dozen vendors that will share that volume, at around 5,000 dollars per system.
- Later phases will increase total quantities while pushing prices toward roughly 2,300 dollars per unit.
Unlike traditional winner‑take‑all programs, this construct deliberately keeps the door open. A larger pool of companies can enter and exit at different stages. Performance in earlier gauntlets will shape who gets a shot at later waves. It blends the language of challenges and other transaction authorizations (OTAs) with the scale of major programs of record (PoR).
The initial submission window closed in January. DoD has already selected 25 Phase I companies and signaled that only a subset of competitors will move on…not just for Phase I, but especially for the much larger later phases.
Drone Dominance is the mass‑end of a portfolio that also includes high‑end CCA, LongShot‑style concepts and exquisite ISR. The program that will fill magazines with attritable, software‑defined drones.
Expect this week’s hallway conversations and panels to connect Drone Dominance’s volume buys to Air Force and Space Force concepts of operations (CONOPS): how massed one‑way‑attack drones, teamed with CCAs and crewed aircraft, will change planning assumptions for contested airspace, base defense and logistics.
SkyFoundry and the FY26 NDAA: Industrial Policy Meets Autonomy
None of this works without an industrial base that can sustain it. That’s where SkyFoundry and the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act come in.
The standalone SkyFoundry Act introduced in 2025 envisioned an organic production hub at Red River Army Depot in Texas, with Army Materiel Command orchestrating design, testing and manufacturing of small UAS. It was designed to leverage depot‑level artisans and engineers, alongside contractors, to build a domestic, government‑anchored pipeline for drones and key subsystems.
Congress didn’t leave this on the cutting‑room floor. The FY26 NDAA, now law, pulls core elements of the concept into statute. Section 914 directs the Deputy Secretary of Defense to create a Small‑UAS Industrial Base Working Group to map suppliers, identify gaps and recommend targeted investments. It authorizes the establishment of SkyFoundry‑style programs and encourages public‑private partnerships and multi‑site production networks.
In practice, that means:
- Depots like Red River are being positioned as anchor sites for drone production.
- The department is expected to use Defense Production Act tools and industrial base funds to reinforce small‑UAS, battery, energetics and microelectronics supply chains.
- Organic and commercial capacity are meant to complement each other to ensure surge potential even if foreign supply lines are disrupted.
For autonomy, avionics and semiconductor players roaming the exhibit floor, SkyFoundry provides a clear indication that Washington sees trusted hardware and resilient manufacturing as inseparable from any serious drone strategy.
Autonomy, Counter‑UAS and the New Economics of Defense
Why the sudden urgency? The answer is visible on every contemporary battlefield. Inexpensive, often commercially derived small drones, many with AI‑assisted targeting and navigation, are inflicting outsized damage on armored vehicles, airfields and logistics nodes.
That creates a two‑sided problem. On offense, militaries need enough autonomous and semi‑autonomous systems to saturate defenses and survive in contested environments. On defense, they need counter‑UAS architectures that can cope with swarms and cheap, abundant threats without burning through multimillion‑dollar interceptors.
The recent U.S. moves point toward a layered solution:
- Executive and Pentagon directives that normalize drones as a default tool of warfighting and deterrence.
- Procurement constructs like Drone Dominance that generate stable demand for attritable, software‑rich platforms and their autonomy cores.
- Industrial‑base provisions in the NDAA that bankroll trusted microelectronics, power systems and production nodes capable of sustaining both offensive and defensive UAS portfolios.
For counter‑UAS specifically, the United States cannot afford to keep spending exquisite munitions on cheap drones. (See prior AG coverage of how fighter pilots shoot down drones). Directed energy, electronic warfare (EW) and smarter, networked interceptors will have to shoulder more of the load. Those systems depend on the same advanced semiconductors and control software the drone enterprise requires.
At AFA’s Warfare Symposium, where agendas are dominated by collaborative autonomy, integrated air and missile defense, and the future of base security, this convergence should be hard to miss. The result is that autonomy, drone production and counter‑UAS are no longer separate conversations in Washington, or in Aurora. They form one continuous policy and technology track.
For companies and innovators in this space, the question is no longer whether Washington is serious about small drones in warfare. Questions remain as to how to align them with an ecosystem built for scale, speed and staying power…and how to plug that reality into Air and Space Force CONOPS being debated right now at the symposium.
This article was inspired by GBEF EDGE 2026 content.