Governments spent more than $29 billion on counter-UAS systems in publicly announced contracts during the first three months of 2026 — a figure that would have represented a full year of C-UAS procurement as recently as 2023. The dominant deal: a $20 billion, ten-year firm-fixed-price contract the US Army awarded Anduril Industries in March for its Lattice AI platform, integrated hardware, data infrastructure, and technical support services.
That single contract accounts for roughly 69% of all publicly recorded Q1 C-UAS spending globally.
The Anduril Contract and What It Covers
The Anduril award is the largest publicly recorded C-UAS contract in history. The ten-year structure and firm-fixed-price terms give Anduril guaranteed revenue visibility through 2036 and lock Lattice into the US Army’s air defense architecture for the next decade. The contract covers the full Lattice stack — the AI-enabled open-architecture software suite, integrated hardware, data and compute infrastructure, and ongoing technical support. It is not a hardware-only procurement. The Army is buying an AI-managed defense operating system with Anduril as the long-term vendor.
The second-largest Q1 contract was Poland’s SAN CUAS programme at $4.2 billion, awarded to a consortium of Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace and Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa to build a drone wall along Poland’s eastern border. Kongsberg’s share of the contract is approximately NOK 16 billion, covering 18 C-UAS batteries.
Who Else Got Contracts
The Q1 awards extend well beyond the two headline deals. In the US alone: the Air Force awarded Trust Automation a $490 million contract for rapid C-UAS research, development, and production; Fortem Technologies received an $18 million three-year Army contract for DroneHunter F700 systems, alongside a separate multi-million dollar order to protect venues at the 2026 FIFA World Cup; BAE Systems was selected to fulfill a Joint Urgent Operational Need for a dual-mode air-to-air C-UAS weapon using a long-wave infrared seeker; and Parsons Corporation secured a $91 million extension on the $1.12 billion OSIS II contract covering C-UAS at US diplomatic facilities globally.
Outside the US: Quantum Systems was tasked to provide 15,000 interceptor drones to Ukraine’s National Guard; Elbit Systems received over $100 million from Israel’s defense R&D directorate for IDF digitization; Colombia announced a $1.6 billion national anti-drone shield; and Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy signed counter-drone and air defense agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE — a direct result of Ukrainian operational expertise against Russian Shahed variants attracting Gulf state procurement interest.
The Scale Problem Has Replaced the Technology Problem
The volume of spending reflects a shift in how defense establishments are framing the C-UAS challenge. The technology question — can systems detect, track, and defeat drones — is largely answered. The problem is now industrial. More than 70 manufacturers produce intercept drones globally, and procurement agencies face a crowded market with overlapping capability claims. The harder challenge is intercepting swarms of cheap loitering munitions at a cost that doesn’t replicate the Patriot-versus-Shahed asymmetry problem in reverse.
Germany’s commitment to fund an anti-drone shield over Ukrainian cities, Norway and the UK each contributing approximately $700 million to Ukrainian air defense, and the NATO PURL programme’s $2 billion air defense allocation for Ukraine are all responses to the same operational lesson: layered C-UAS at city scale requires continuous logistics, not just capable hardware.
The Anduril contract’s scale and duration suggest the US Army has settled on Lattice as its C-UAS software foundation. The remaining procurement question is which hardware vendors integrate into that architecture — and how many of the 70-plus intercept drone manufacturers survive long enough to find out.
