U.S. Army Places $52+ Million Order for Skydio X10D, the Largest Single-Vendor Tactical sUAS Order in Army History

Specialist Lathan Thomley learned to fly drones on a $10 Steam game called Liftoff. That is not a metaphor — it is literally how the Army is now onboarding sUAS operators, according to Defense News coverage of the Small Robotic Reconnaissance program. You buy the game, you fly the sim, and eventually you get handed the real thing. The real thing, as of this week, is a Skydio X10D.

The U.S. Army placed an order for Skydio X10D drones through Atlantic Diving Supply under Tranche 2 of the SRR program. Skydio announced the order as exceeding $52 million for more than 2,500 units — figures the company describes as the largest single-vendor tactical small unmanned aircraft system order in Army history. Those numbers have not been independently confirmed by the Army, and no matching contract notice has appeared on war.gov or SAM.gov as of publication. The order was placed through an existing Other Transaction Agreement — a procurement mechanism specifically designed to move outside traditional channels, which also means it bypasses the contract notice requirements that would trigger a public announcement. That structural reality explains the speed. It does not provide independent verification of the dollar figure or unit count.

At that volume, the implied per-unit cost lands somewhere between $17,000 and $21,000 — commercial-scale pricing for a drone now carrying Teledyne FLIR Boson+ thermal optics, a 12-kilometer range, and an AES-256 encrypted data link.

The dollar figure is striking. The acceleration is the actual story.

Tranche 1 of the SRR contract ran at roughly $20.2 million per year over five years, with multiple vendors competing for each delivery order. This single Tranche 2 award, if Skydio's figures are accurate, is 2.5 times a full Tranche 1 annual spend — reportedly executed in under 72 hours as an urgent procurement action, according to the company. The Army is not just buying more Skydio drones. It is compressing its acquisition timeline and consolidating its tactical sUAS supply chain around a single commercial vendor at a scale it has not done before.

The X10D is built around two lessons from Ukraine. The first is GPS vulnerability. Ukrainian battlefield reports, and a Wall Street Journal investigation from April 2024, documented how Russian electronic warfare systems degraded or defeated drone navigation, including reportedly the earlier Skydio X2D. Skydio has not confirmed those specific field failures, and the WSJ reporting has not been independently corroborated by Army or DOD sources. What is documented: the X10D is designed from the ground up for GPS-denied environments. It runs NVIDIA Jetson Orin and Qualcomm QRB5165 processors, with six onboard navigation cameras running visual-inertial odometry at plus-or-minus 10 centimeter accuracy without any satellite input. The second lesson is thermal. The X10D is the first sUAS to carry a Teledyne FLIR Boson+ thermal sensor — a capability that in Ukraine has proven decisive for detecting heat signatures through smoke, foliage, and low-light conditions.

None of this would be possible at scale without a supply chain decision Skydio made eighteen months earlier. In August 2023, the company exited the consumer drone market entirely, shutting down its hobbyist line and redirecting its manufacturing operation toward defense and enterprise. At the time, the move read as retreat — a startup that could not compete with DJI on price or distribution. In retrospect, it was a prerequisite. Skydio now claims 9-minute build times and capacity to produce more than 1,000 drones per month, according to company materials. That is a manufacturing profile the Army actually needs.

The competitive landscape for tactical sUAS is not empty. Anduril's Ghost is a fixed-wing ISR platform aimed at the same contested-airspace problem. BRINC makes indoor and confined-space drones for law enforcement and tactical entry. Shield AI is pressing into autonomous wing-man territory. But none of them have landed a Skydio-scale sUAS award from the Army this week. The SRR program — covering short-range reconnaissance in urban and complex terrain — has, at least in this tranche, gone to Skydio.

The allied-nation signal is worth tracking. Norway selected the X10D in July 2025 in a $9.4 million tender, according to ASD News. Small number on its own. Alongside the Army order, it suggests the X10D is becoming the default NATO-tier short-range reconnaissance platform for GPS-denied environments — not just a U.S. procurement choice.

What the Army has independently confirmed: the SRR Tranche 2 program is real. Army.mil documented the Technical Directive in a December 2025 article, and the procurement structure — an OTA placed through Atlantic Diving Supply — is consistent with how the Army has moved quickly on sUAS acquisition before. The $52 million figure, the 2,500-unit count, and the superlative about Army history all come from Skydio's own announcement materials. Whether those figures get a DOD contract notice attached to them or remain company-side is, at this point, an open question.

The OTA mechanism is worth understanding in its own right. The Army has used Other Transaction Authorities specifically to break the procurement speed problem — bypassing the Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements that can stretch a competitive bid process into years. Skydio's CEO cited a 72-hour window from bid to award, which would be extraordinary by traditional standards. That claim, too, comes from the company alone. The structural design of OTAs makes the speed plausible. It does not confirm the specific timeline.

What the order signals, if Skydio's numbers hold: the Army has moved past the pilot-program phase with autonomous commercial sUAS. Not a research contract, not a competitive prototype exercise — a bulk buy, executed at speed, from a company that makes one drone. That is a trust level. The Army confirmed the program exists and issued the procurement directive. The scale of the commitment is, for now, what Skydio says it is.

Spc. Thomley graduated from Liftoff to the X10D. The question now is how many of his successors the Army intends to equip the same way — and whether the government's own procurement records eventually put a number on it.