WWII Called From Ohio: A Youngstown Drone Startup Is the Arsenal of Democracy, Again

In 1940, a Youngstown steel mill owner got a call from the Pentagon asking him to retool every machine shop in his region and start turning out tank parts at speed. The answer was yes. Eighty-five years later, another Pentagon buyer is making the same call to the same region about a different kind of machine: the expendable drone.

Agilis Air, a startup in North Benton, Ohio, announced Monday that it qualified for Phase II of the Department of War's Drone Dominance Program — and not just in one mission category, but two. The company cleared the bar for both long-range strike and urban assault profiles, a dual selection that set it apart from most of the 48 other companies entering Gauntlet 2 trials this summer, where the DDP plans to award just eight production contracts total — five for long-range and three for close-quarters drones.

But Phase II is not a production contract. Of the 49 companies invited to compete, eight will walk away with awards. The rest will have spent months and resources for a program invitation that went nowhere. Historically, Phase I winners do not always translate to production contracts — the DDP's own track record is still being written. The Gauntlet 2 trials, scheduled for Camp Grayling, Michigan, will test all 48 qualifying companies under continuous C-UAS jamming conditions — four days of electronic warfare the program calls Gauntlet 2. The jamming is the point. Unlike Gauntlet 1, which tested drones in benign conditions, Phase 2 evaluates whether these systems can perform when GPS and control links are degraded. That is the real gate, and it has not been cleared yet.

The contract math is where it gets interesting. The DDP's solicitation sets a per-UAV price ceiling of $5,500 for long-range and $4,500 for short-range systems, but the program's actual target for attritable FPV production is below $2,000 per unit. The current market average sits around $7,000, with three-month lead times for orders of a thousand. The program is working with a $1.1 billion authorization ceiling — not a guaranteed outlay — and has publicly stated it aims to procure up to 300,000 FPV drones from top performers. The gap between where the market is and where the DDP needs it to be is not a feature request. It is an ultimatum.

"Our Agilis 'Remora' was designed specifically to allow for rapid mass-production of a low-cost, high-performance UAS," said Shawn Theiss, Agilis Air's CEO and founder, in a company announcement. Theiss has been building drones for defense customers for two decades. The Remora is the company's bet that the factory floor matters as much as the flight controller. The company declined to specify current unit cost or production capacity for this story.

What makes Agilis Air's positioning notable is what it represents about the power shift the DDP is engineering. The program has drawn in traditional defense primes — AeroVironment and Kratos both entered Gauntlet 2 with serious production ambitions — alongside non-traditional manufacturers optimized for scalable, low-cost production. The distinction matters. Traditional primes compete on precision platforms with high per-unit margins. The DDP's price ceilings and domestic supply chain requirements are deliberately engineering out the overhead of that cost structure — the engineering documentation, the compliance burden, the profit expectations built around small quantities of expensive systems. Agilis Air and companies like it are competing on a different model entirely: consumer electronics production applied to weapons. That is a structural disadvantage for primes whose cost basis assumes the opposite of what this program rewards.

The Drone Dominance Program is, at its core, a bet that the United States can rebuild in eighteen months what it spent three decades allowing to atrophy — a domestic drone manufacturing base. Ukraine has been operating FPVs as expendable tactical weapons since 2022, and the US has been watching. The question is whether American manufacturers can catch up fast enough to matter.

If the DDP model works, it creates a new category of defense contractor: regional Midwest manufacturers who scale like consumer electronics producers. If it fails, the US enters a near-term conflict outmatched on the drone mass-production axis by adversaries who have been building FPVs at scale for years.

Agilis Air grew out of the YBI Engine Tech Incubator in Youngstown, backed by grants from the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining and the federally funded YBI Rising Tides Initiative. The company built its prototype in North Benton, Ohio, in a region that spent the 1980s and 1990s learning what it felt like to lose an industrial ecosystem. The same geography, the same workforce, the same retooling instincts — now pointed at a different kind of production problem.

The companies that will win under the DDP are the ones that can mass-produce cheap, expendable drones — not the ones with the best technology. That is a fundamental shift in what the Pentagon values, and it is playing out in Ohio, not Silicon Valley. Whether Agilis Air can clear the jamming trials at Camp Grayling and prove its cost structure holds under operational conditions is the question that will answer whether this particular Arsenal of Democracy has anything to sell.