JAKARTA - The Pentagon plans to hold a contest for small and start-up companies to select suppliers of 300,000 small-sized attack drones.
The 18-month competition will compete for a defense contract worth 1.1 billion US dollars.
The funds are expected to be enough to buy hundreds of ribudroneserang.
As reported by ANTARA from Sputnik, Tuesday, June 2, in the draft next year's defense budget, an allocation of 54.6 billion dollars is included to fund the drone warfare unit, which has been significantly expanded.
The Pentagon estimates the US military must stockpile small drones in large numbers each year.
The price of one unit is around 5,000 dollars, and the system is designed as a disposable equipment, so that losses in the battlefield are not considered critical for the budget.
Among the featured participants are British company Skycutter and US company Neros, founded by former drone racing champion Soren Monroe-Anderson.
Neros has already worked with the US Army and Marine Corps.
The Pentagon plans to narrow the list of participants to three to five main suppliers.
For this, the military conducted a series of tests in conditions resembling combat missions.
The first phase of the contest took place last February in Fort Benning, Georgia, with 26 companies invited.
Participants were given two hours to train military pilots to use their system, before the drones were tested in the field.
The tasks assigned include hitting a table-sized target at a distance of up to nine km and detonating explosives inside buildings.
The English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French versions are automatically generated by the AI. So there may still be inaccuracies in translating, please always see Indonesian as our main language. (system supported by DigitalSiber.id)
