Army buys 13,000 counter-drone units

The U.S. Army says it bought about 13,000 low-cost interceptor drones in roughly eight days to counter Iranian Shahed attacks. (defensenews.com) Army Secretary Dan Driscoll disclosed the purchase at an April 16, 2026 House Appropriations defense hearing, saying the service used a streamlined acquisition process instead of a years-long buying cycle. (appropriations.house.gov) (defensenews.com) The interceptor is the Merops, made by Perennial Autonomy, formerly Project Eagle, and Army officials put the current price at about $15,000 each. At that rate, 13,000 units would imply roughly $195 million in hardware. (army.mil) (defensenews.com) A counter-drone interceptor is a drone sent after another drone, like using one small aircraft to chase and destroy another before it reaches a base or city. Military Times reported these systems are meant to ram or detonate near incoming drones at altitude, preserving larger missiles for harder targets. (militarytimes.com) That matters because the Army is trying to stop cheap one-way attack drones without spending far more on every shot. Driscoll said a Shahed costs an estimated $30,000 to $50,000, while Merops could fall below $10,000 at larger scale. (defensenews.com) The Army is not starting from zero. An Army article on March 26 said Merops had already been deployed to Poland and Romania, where U.S., Polish and Romanian forces were fielding and training on it after urgent drone incursions along NATO’s eastern flank. (army.mil) The same Army article said G-TEAD, the Global Tactical Edge Acquisition Directorate, used an existing contract vehicle to buy 50 systems for experimentation and operational use during a joint exercise. That helps explain how the service moved from trials in Europe to a much larger wartime buy. (army.mil) Merops is one layer in a broader counter-drone stack, not a replacement for everything else. RTX says its Coyote interceptor, paired with the Ku-band Radio Frequency Sensor, is already part of the Army’s Low, slow, small, unmanned aircraft Integrated Defeat System for longer-range and higher-altitude threats. (rtx.com) The Army is also building a faster buying pipeline around this problem. DefenseScoop reported the Pentagon’s Counter-UAS Marketplace launched earlier this year as an “Amazon-like” catalog for anti-drone parts and systems, and Joint Interagency Task Force 401 said $13 million in tech had already been bought through it. (defensescoop.com) What the Army has not spelled out publicly is how many crews will operate these 13,000 interceptors, where they will be based, or how sustainment will work after the first rush order. The purchase answers the immediate shortage question faster than it answers the longer one: how this becomes a standing air-defense layer instead of an emergency buy. (appropriations.house.gov) (defensenews.com)