# DHS $1.5B Counter-UAS IDIQ Award On **August 5, 2026**, the [[Department of Homeland Security]] Science and Technology Directorate awarded a **$1.5 billion, five-year indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract** for [[Counter-UAS]] capability to **twelve companies** across two tracks. It is the department's first unified, department-wide counter-drone procurement vehicle — consolidating what had been scattered component-level buys into a single vehicle usable across CBP, ICE, Secret Service, and the rest of DHS. --- ## The two tracks **Track one — hardware, software, and ancillary services:** [[BAE Systems]], [[CACI International]], Dedrone Defense (the defense arm of [[Dedrone]]), D-Fend Solutions, EMS Defense Technologies, [[Fortem Technologies]], [[Leidos]] **Track two — comprehensive service providers:** [[Anduril]], Astrion, [[BAE Systems]], [[Booz Allen Hamilton]], [[General Dynamics]] IT, [[Leidos]], [[Parsons Corporation]] BAE Systems and Leidos are the only firms on both tracks. --- ## The Anduril protest [[Anduril]] won a track-two position but was **excluded from track one**, and is challenging DHS's evaluation of its proposal, arguing it should have won both. This is the part worth recording. The vault's Anduril file set is a record of directed and consolidated awards: the [[Anduril $20B Army Contract]] that folded 120+ contracts into one vehicle, the [[Anduril CBP 363M Sentry Tower Contract]], the Air Force CCA production award. The company's characteristic mode is winning the vehicle, not competing inside one. Here it entered a fully competed evaluation against seven incumbent primes, and lost half of it. That makes this file useful in a way its dollar figure does not justify: it is the **counter-example** in a folder otherwise full of confirmations. --- ## What the awardee list actually shows Twelve winners, most of them specialists. The counter-drone market has **not consolidated** the way defense data analytics did around [[Palantir]] or autonomous systems around Anduril. DHS could find a dozen credible vendors, which is a statement about market structure: interception, detection, and mitigation are still distinct technical problems solved by distinct companies, and no one has built the platform that subsumes them. It is also a reminder that the incumbents are not being displaced on the schedule the [[Defense Tech as Asset Class]] thesis implies. BAE, Leidos, CACI, Booz Allen, General Dynamics, and Parsons took ten of the nineteen track positions. The venture-backed entrant took one and is contesting the other. --- ## The domestic dimension Counter-UAS at DHS is not the same problem as counter-UAS at the Pentagon. The airspace being defended is domestic, the drones being detected are frequently hobbyist or commercial, and the sensing infrastructure that identifies a hostile drone also identifies everything else flying — which is why [[Dedrone]]'s acquisition by [[Axon Enterprise]], a police-equipment vendor, is the quiet part of this award. Capability is entering domestic policing through a procurement channel that departments already use for body cameras. --- ## Watch - **GAO protest outcome.** A denial would be the first documented instance of Anduril losing and failing to reverse a competitive federal evaluation. - **Task order flow.** An IDIQ ceiling is not money. The real distribution shows up in task orders, and the vehicle's five-year life means the ceiling may never be reached. ## See Also - [[Anduril]] - [[Counter-UAS]] - [[Department of Homeland Security]] - [[Anduril $20B Army Contract]] - [[Anduril CBP 363M Sentry Tower Contract]] - [[Palantir $244M Pentagon No-Bid Directive]] - [[Dedrone]] - [[Fortem Technologies]] - [[CACI International]] - [[Booz Allen Hamilton]] - [[Defense Tech as Asset Class]]