US Army to open internal UAS Marketplace website

A 101st Airborne Division soldier prepares an Anduril Ghost-X UAS during an exercise in Romania during July 2025. Although the 101st is a TiC unit, regular army units will soon be able to select UASs from the marketplace. (US Army 7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

The US Army intends to set up an internal Amazon-like marketplace for units to purchase small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), the service's UAS programme manager, Colonel Danielle Medaglia, told reporters on 7 August. The new website, set to roll out in September, is a departure from the traditional procurement system that stresses developing systems based on requirements and instead presents units with a variety of existing UASs to select whichever meets their needs.

“It's really a strategy of getting UAS capability into the hands of soldiers as quickly as possible,” Col Medaglia said. “The UAS space is super dynamic and moving really quickly.”

“The UAS Marketplace is our strategy to scale the industrial base and accelerate production deliveries while empowering soldiers with freedom of choice to meet mission needs,” Col Medaglia continued. “The UAS Marketplace is marking a really significant pivot from traditional DoD [Department of Defense] business models to more of a free-market approach founded on the concept of continuous competition that drives innovation, where soldier demands are directly linked to industry-provided capability.”

The army has been working to introduce UAS into every unit echelon, starting with selected Transformation in Contact (TiC) and Human-Machine Integration (HMI) units, which were equipped with a rotating slate of small UASs to put through their paces in realistic training environments.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth released a memo in April directing the army to integrate UASs into every army division.