Army poised to build drone marketplace for soldiers and units

The United States Army will be creating a marketplace to better match drones with units based on their requirements.

With so many vendors providing a variety of unmanned aerial systems, it can be difficult for formations to determine if certain systems will in fact meet their needs.

“There’s awesome items, awesome systems out there right now, but sometimes folks that sell, sell. The units call us as the UAS experts and say, ‘hey, what can this thing really do versus what may be a PowerPoint slide?’ That’s where we want to help the soldiers when they’re making these choices,” Col. Danielle Medaglia, project manager for UAS at program executive office for aviation, told reporters during a teleconference Thursday. “We will ensure it does what they actually advertise that it can do, and then what above and beyond what it may advertise and to include confirming NDAA compliance and confirm different things like ranges, endurance, payloads, capability, etc. Because right now, unfortunately, there’s just a lot of vendors in the space, which is great. But at the same time, it’s sometimes confusing soldiers based on the phone calls that we get. And we see our role as UAS experts to help those soldiers make those choices.”

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