Governments announced more than $53 billion of counter-drone contracts between January and the start of September, according to the September edition of the Unmanned Airspace Counter-UAS Directory, which tracks publicly disclosed awards. Its editor, Philip Butterworth-Hayes, expects the figure to rise again before the year ends.
Three awards carry most of it. The US Army’s ten-year supply contract with Anduril Industries, announced in March, is $20 billion on its own. Poland’s SAN counter-UAS programme, going to a consortium of Kongsberg Defence and Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, is $4.2 billion. Belgium and the Netherlands announced a joint purchase worth €3.1 billion in July.
FlightBrief reported the same directory’s first-quarter figure of $29 billion in April. The eight-month total is therefore about $24 billion of new commitments across the five months since, and the $20 billion Anduril award sits inside the first quarter rather than on top of it.
That matters for anyone reading the headline as a demand signal. Strip out one ten-year framework booked in March and global counter-drone contracting for the year to date is nearer $33 billion — still a large number, and a very different growth curve from the one $53 billion implies.
Where the rest went
Support for Ukraine is the largest single segment, including EU disbursements of €1 billion and €3.9 billion.
Among NATO members, $2 billion was allocated for counter-UAS within a $38 billion 2026 support package. Germany accounts for roughly $13 billion of national spending in the directory’s count. Norway and the United Kingdom each committed around $700 million to air defence. Arab Gulf states are recorded as significant buyers without published totals.
The directory counts announcements rather than outlays. A ten-year framework, a signed order and a budget line all enter as the same kind of number, which is the standard problem with defence market totals and the reason the composition is worth more than the headline.
The number nobody publishes
What none of this shows is how much of the equipment works.
Counter-drone procurement is being written against a threat that has changed twice inside two years. Fibre-optic control links remove the radio emission that most detection depends on. FPV video channels have moved up in frequency past the ceiling of fielded receivers. A system bought in 2024 against radio-controlled quadcopters may not detect what crossed a European airfield fence this year.
Poland’s SAN programme is not expected to begin operations until late 2026, and larger Romanian batteries are scheduled to arrive by the end of the decade. The gap between the contract date and the working system is where the $53 billion actually sits.
