Finland has signed and a US framework is ready. The Iran war showed why Ukrainian interceptors have to travel with Ukrainian components, software and operators.
At least 20 counter-drone vendors at NORTHCOM's border-focused Falcon Peak 26.2 had to feed their tracks into Anduril's Lattice, including interceptors Ukraine already flies against Russian drones.
The Gauntlet II leaderboard picks the vendors in line for a 60,000-drone Pentagon order, but the program still calls them finalists and says awards are not guaranteed.
NATO's first drone shootdown over Lithuania came from Baltic Air Policing fighters, five months after Lithuania bought 48 interceptors priced near $15,000 a shot for exactly this job.
The Army's autonomous breaching package finished two weeks of live fire at Fort Bragg built almost entirely from small-vendor hardware, and goes to Fort Irwin in October.
Ukrainian operators lose the radio link before impact and the strike lands anyway. Over Edwards Air Force Base, an AI agent flew 27 intercepts on a passive infrared feed. Both ends of the price curve are solving the same problem.
The Perennial Hornet is a ~$5,000 AI-guided one-way strike drone from Eric Schmidt's Perennial Autonomy — an optically navigated fixed-wing aircraft Ukrainian units use to burn Russian supply trucks 50-150 km behind the front, the workhorse of Kyiv's "logistics lockdown" campaign.
A southern-border test validated CACI's net-and-jam system for the entire US military, the latest move in a counter-drone scramble shaped by the drone war in Ukraine and by hostile drones now killing American troops.
A $5,000 drone from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Perennial Autonomy is letting Ukraine burn Russian supply trucks deep behind the front.