On 7 August a contracting officer at the Department of Homeland Security signed a two-page notice that reads like a seating chart. Fifty-seven proposals had come in for the hardware half of a counter-drone contract and forty-seven for the services half. Fourteen contract numbers went out between them, 70RDA226D00000001 through 70RDA226D00000014. Twelve companies hold those fourteen slots, because Leidos and BAE Systems Technology Solutions and Services each took a seat on both sides.
A hundred and four proposals for fourteen places is a crowded competition. It got crowded for reasons that have little to do with this contract and a great deal to do with the five weeks before it.
Permission, money, and a way to buy
Selling counter-drone equipment in the United States has been a poor business for years, for a plain reason: almost nobody outside the federal government was allowed to use it. The authority to interfere with an aircraft in flight sat with a short list of federal agencies under the 2018 Preventing Emerging Threats Act, kept alive by a run of short extensions. A sheriff could buy a sensor and watch a drone cross a stadium. Doing anything about it was someone else's job, and in practice usually nobody's.
Three things changed that inside a single summer.
Permission. The SAFER SKIES Act, carried in the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, extended counter-drone authority to state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement and correctional agencies. The Justice Department and DHS then issued a joint interim final rule, effective 1 July 2026 and published on 6 July, with comments open until 4 September. It creates two certification tiers, one for detection and warning and one for mitigation, and wraps them in rules on approved equipment, spectrum coordination, airspace approval, live notification to air traffic control and mandatory reporting after any mitigation. Certification attaches to the individual officer, not the department, and is federally supervised.
Money. FEMA's Counter-UAS Grant Program put $500 million behind that authority, appropriated under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act at Public Law 119-21, section 90005(a). The first $250 million went out for fiscal 2026, weighted toward jurisdictions hosting National Special Security Events and the upper tiers of Special Event Assessment Rating events. The second $250 million arrives in fiscal 2027 and opens to every state and territory.
A way to buy. That is the 7 August notice, and it is the piece most often misread, so it is worth being exact about who it serves.
The new contract is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicle, which means it names an approved supplier set and a ceiling and commits the government to almost nothing until it places an order. It is a DHS instrument for DHS components, Customs and Border Protection, ICE and the Coast Guard among them. A county sheriff cannot call up Fortem and buy a radar against it. Grant recipients spending FEMA money run their own competitions under their own procurement rules.
The vehicle still shapes what those departments buy, in two ways that matter more than an ordering channel would. It publishes a federally vetted list of twelve firms, which is the single cheapest piece of due diligence available to a police department that has never bought this class of equipment before. And it sets a performance specification that state buyers will copy, because copying the federal threshold is how a municipal purchase survives an audit.
The dates repay a second look. Ordering opened thirteen days after the World Cup final and the awards landed nineteen days after it. The tournament that shaped the first tranche of grant money was over before the supplier list existed. Los Angeles 2028 is the next fixed date on the calendar, and this vehicle runs to July 2031.
What DHS actually bought
Track 1 covers hardware, software and ancillary services. It went to Dedrone Defense, D-Fend Solutions, Leidos, Fortem Technologies, CACI Inc. Federal, BAE Systems Technology Solutions and Services, and EMS Defense Technologies. Track 2 covers comprehensive services, meaning turnkey deployment and integration, and went to Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Information Technology, Parsons Government Services, BAE, Leidos, Anduril Industries and Astrion Group.
DHS's Office of Procurement Operations ran the competition and the Science and Technology Directorate is the funding agency. S&T has run the department's counter-drone testing for years, so it is a reasonable home for a department-wide vehicle, but it is not an operator. The components that will place the orders sit elsewhere, and their appetite is the thing to watch.
The performance floor is modest, and deliberately so. A system has to detect a drone at 2 kilometres, follow at least three at once, and defeat one at 500 metres. Those are perimeter numbers. They describe a stadium, a border crossing, a prison yard or a substation, and they sit well below what these same vendors sell to the Pentagon. They are also thresholds rather than targets: an individual task order can demand a great deal more, and the floor exists to decide who was allowed on the list at all.
Then there is the figure nobody quoted. Each of the fourteen contracts carries a guaranteed minimum of $250. That is not a typo and it is not a trick, it is the nominal consideration that turns an indefinite-delivery award into a binding contract. Across all fourteen, DHS has committed $3,500 and reserved the right to spend a great deal more. The ceiling is permission to buy, and permission is what was handed out this month.
💡The notice states an IDIQ maximum of $1,500,000,000 under Track 1, then states the same figure again under Track 2. The split behind that repetition is public: hardware carries a ceiling of roughly $1.011 billion, a figure Fortem quotes in its own award announcement, services roughly $489 million, and the two sum to the single $1.5 billion programme. Anyone modelling a pipeline off this award should size hardware against a billion dollars over five years, not one and a half, and services against a third of that.
The buyers arrived before the rule did
$1.5B purchase, announced Jun 2026
$1.5B spending cap, five years
$500M appropriated
~$503M purchase, closed Oct 2024
Two of the three best-known counter-drone product companies selling into the United States were acquired within two years of this competition, and neither buyer was a defence prime.
Axon, which makes Tasers and police body cameras, completed its purchase of Dedrone in October 2024, paying about $391 million for the 79.8 percent it did not already own against a holding valued at $112 million, so roughly half a billion dollars all in. Motorola Solutions, which sells police radios and dispatch systems, agreed on 1 June 2026 to buy the Israeli firm D-Fend Solutions for $1.5 billion, against expected 2026 revenue of about $185 million. That is roughly eight times sales for a company whose signature product takes control of a drone over its own radio link and lands it rather than shooting it down, a distinction that matters when the rules on approved equipment and spectrum decide what a police force may actually switch on. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter.
Neither acquirer was buying a defence contractor. Both were buying a product to push down a distribution channel they already owned, into police departments and correctional facilities that were, on the day the cheques were signed, mostly forbidden from using it. Motorola paid as much for one company as DHS put on five years of its own departmental buying. That is a bet on the sheriff rather than the Pentagon, placed before the rule that pays it off was final.
Both companies duly hold Track 1 seats.
Fortem Technologies is the last independent pure-play on the hardware list. EMS Defense Technologies of Norcross, Georgia is the one name outside the usual set, a small manufacturer in the detection and navigation equipment category rather than a familiar counter-drone brand. CACI, BAE and Leidos are there as integrators. The services track reads as a conventional federal-services roster, with one exception.
The exception is at the GAO
Anduril Industries won a Track 2 seat and no Track 1 seat, and filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office on 12 August. A decision is due by 20 November. The company is challenging the department's evaluation of its proposal and argues it should have been awarded on both tracks.
The result is odd on its face. Anduril builds counter-drone hardware, including Sentry surveillance towers and the Anvil interceptor, and it has been the loudest name in American counter-drone for years. The award as it stands says the company may sell DHS counter-drone services and integration, but not the equipment underneath them.
Protests of this shape rarely erase an award. In a multiple-award competition the commoner outcomes are corrective action or a re-evaluation of a single offeror, which can end with an extra seat added rather than an existing one taken away. The sharper question for anyone tracking this is what the clock does to Track 1 in the meantime, because a protest filed a week after award tends to slow the hardware side while the services side carries on. A November decision sits neatly between FEMA's two grant tranches.
What to watch
Task orders, not the ceiling. A vehicle with $3,500 of committed minimums tells you what DHS is permitted to buy. The first task orders, and which component signs them, tell you what it intends to buy. Read those.
The fiscal 2027 tranche. The first $250 million went to event hosts. The second opens to every state and territory, and that is where counter-drone stops being an occasion-driven purchase and starts looking like radios or body cameras, which is exactly the shape Axon and Motorola paid for.
Certified officers, not boxes. Certification is individual, role-specific and federally overseen, and the rule also fixes which equipment may be used and on what spectrum. A department can take delivery of a system considerably faster than it can qualify the people allowed to switch it on. Expect training and support to be the binding constraint through 2027.
The performance floor. Detection at 2 kilometres and defeat at 500 metres handles the drone that wandered over a stadium. It does not handle a coordinated group, and the FAA logged 601 drone sightings near airports in the second quarter of 2026, nearly double the quarter before. A harder tier of requirement is coming, and most of the firms able to meet it are already on this list.
The number everyone repeated this month was $1.5 billion. The number that describes what actually happened is $250. DHS has committed $3,500 in total and named the twelve companies allowed to compete for whatever follows, which is the real prize and the reason a hundred and four proposals turned up for fourteen seats. Whether the money arrives is not being decided at DHS. It is being decided in a few thousand police departments that now have the authority and the grant money, and that still have to run their own competitions and certify their own officers before a single drone comes down. The sellers are ready. The buyers are the open question.
Contract detail is drawn from the DHS post-award notice for solicitation 70RDA226R00000001, dated 7 August 2026, with award, ordering-period and protest specifics from federal procurement reporting. Regulatory detail comes from the DOJ and DHS interim final rule published 6 July 2026 and FEMA's Counter-UAS Grant Program materials. For the wider market, see our sizing of the counter-UAS build-out, the contract database and the analysis dashboard. Drone Consult sells procurement intelligence built on this data.