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HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – While the Army is turning to its new UAS Marketplace as the primary way forward for buying Group 1 to 3 drones, a lead official said Wednesday that will likely not be the case for the service’s launched effects procurement.
“I think the marketplace is the primary way forward for a lot of our systems, maybe not launched effects. Because, launched effects, when you use [them] properly, right, it’s a mix of capabilities. And I’m not sure that’s going to [work] in the marketplace very well as a group of capabilities,” Rodney Davis, capability program executive for aviation, said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium here. “You don’t get launched effects capability by buying one or two of them, right, you need mass.”
Davis said that accelerating launched effects plans is “limited by funding,” when asked by Defense Daily whether the marketplace could potentially facilitate faster fielding of those capabilities.
“To date, we’ve never really maxed out the supply chains of our manufacturers,” he said. “I think for a lot of manufacturers, if you ask if they’re producing at scale if you could, the answer is they’re not. So I think so far we haven’t pressure tested how much they can produce.”
The Army on Tuesday officially launched its UAS Marketplace, with around 30 Group 1 and 2 systems currently listed for purchase on the “Amazon-like” digital storefront with an aim to eventually bring on systems from hundreds of companies over the next two years (Defense Daily, March 24).
“[This] really gives soldiers the access they need to capabilities that meet their needs way different than before, a fundamental pivot in how we execute acquisition for uncrewed aircraft systems,” Col. Danielle Medaglia, project manager for UAS, told reporters.
Along with complete drone capabilities, the Army has described the UAS Marketplace as a “one stop shop” for trusted capabilities, to include launched effects as well as payloads, software and autonomy algorithms, with users able to filter systems by group size, range, speed, cost and manufacturing capacity.
Launched effects is the Army’s program to field new autonomous air vehicles that can be launched from aircraft or ground platforms with a variety of payloads and mission system applications to provide a range of effects for reconnaissance, extended communications links and eventually lethal capabilities.
The Army in October said it had selected AEVEX Aerospace’s Atlas and Anduril Industries’ Altius 600 for its initial Launched Effects-Short Range fielding, after both offerings were part of special user demonstration (Defense Daily, Oct. 13, 2025).
The Army in January said for the Long Range Precision Munition, its lethal Launched Effects variant, it plans to award a contract in October and could eventually build 200 to 600 prototype systems (Defense Daily, Jan. 9).
