Pentagon reveals preferred munitions for one-way attack drones

The Pentagon recently named the winners of the Lethality Prize Challenge in the Drone Dominance program, a $1.1 billion effort to expand domestic drone production and reduce the cost of commercial drones for military use. The Defense Innovation Unit announced in a LinkedIn post last month that the winners — Bravo Ordnance, Kela Technologies, Kraken Kinetics, Mountain Horse Solutions and Northrop Grumman — developed “cost-effective, mass-producible, and easily integrated lethal payloads for small drones.” According to the program’s Industry Day presentation, military officials reviewed submissions from 17 vendors. Evaluators examined both the payloads themselves and how they interfaced with various Electronic Safe and Arm Devices, or ESADs, as well as their compatibility with drones being considered in the program’s broader competition. Although the cash prize was just $10,000 — a modest sum compared to the scale of the Pentagon’s investment — the selected designs will be presented to companies participating in the program as “preferred munitions” for one-way attack drones. Northrop Grumman’s winning design, dubbed the Common UAS Payload, was built to require “no redesigns” and is “ready to integrate and deploy immediately,” according to a statement from Tanya Santers, the company’s director of fuzes and warheads. The company added that it has invested more than $2 billion over the past several years in technologies and manufacturing facilities to meet the program’s requirements and accelerate delivery timelines. Unlike Northrop Grumman, which enters the competition with an established defense-industrial base and decades of experience producing munitions for the Pentagon, most of the other winners are relatively young companies hoping to capitalize on the military’s growing demand for drone warfare technology. The Texas-based Bravo Ordnance launched in 2025 with $3.5 million in venture capital. The company bills itself as capable of creating custom warheads in “two weeks or less.” Founder Devan Plantamura, a Navy and Army veteran, told GQ magazine that his experience working at military technology startups convinced him the industry focused too heavily on drone platforms and not enough on the weapons they carry. Without a warhead, he said, an attack drone is “just a flying object.” The Israeli defense startup Kela Technologies was founded in July 2024 following the Oct. 7 attack as a software company focused on helping Western militaries rapidly integrate commercial technology into existing military systems. The company quickly attracted backing from Silicon Valley investors as well as IQT, the CIA’s investment arm. In just two years, Kela has raised roughly $100 million, secured an additional $200 million in financing and earned a reported valuation of $1.2 billion. Although software integration remains its primary business, Kela was also named a winner of the Lethality Prize. The company reportedly partnered with fellow Israeli defense firm Auto…