The U.S. Army is getting serious about FPV drones. It selected Draganfly Inc., which is a publicly traded company headquartered in Saskatoon, Canada, to supply Flex FPV drone systems.
But here’s where it gets interesting: instead of just shipping boxes of drones from factories back home, Draganfly will help establish on-site manufacturing facilities at overseas U.S. Forces locations. That’s right — the Army wants to build drones closer to where they’ll actually be used.
Why the Draganfly FPV news matters
If you’ve been following the evolution of drone warfare (and if you’re reading this site, you probably have), you know that FPV drones have fundamentally changed modern combat. We’ve seen this play out dramatically in Ukraine, where cheap, nimble FPV drones have challenged traditional military hardware in ways that seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. And the U.S. military has been paying very close attention.
During the Swift Response 2025 exercise in Lithuania earlier this year, paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade flew and detonated their own in-house-built FPV drones against dismounted troops and vehicle-sized autonomous targets. The unit even established its own drone lab for design, training, and rapid innovation. In short, it created its own DIY workshop for building military drones.
And in August 2025, the U.S. Army achieved a significant milestone: the first-ever air-to-air kill with an armed FPV drone, signaling that drone-on-drone warfare is becoming a reality.
What Draganfly will do
Under this initial order, Draganfly will deliver three key components:
- Flex FPV drone systems designed for high-performance military operations.
- On-site manufacturing capabilities within overseas U.S. Forces facilities to speed up deployment and cut supply-chain delays.
- Comprehensive training covering both flight operations and manufacturing, plus logistics management to ensure NDAA-compliant supply chains.
“We are honored to support the U.S. Army as it moves critical drone capabilities closer to front lines,” said Cameron Chell, President and CEO of Draganfly in a prepared statement. “By combining advanced Flex FPV Drone systems, embedded manufacturing, training and secure logistics, we are helping reinforce operational agility and sustainment for forward-deployed forces.”
The bigger picture: decentralized drone manufacturing
This embedded manufacturing approach represents a significant shift in how the military thinks about drone procurement.
Traditional defense contracts mean ordering equipment, waiting for it to be manufactured somewhere far away, shipping it overseas and hoping it arrives when you need it. That model works fine for some things, but FPV drones for military use are different. They’re relatively simple to build, they’re expendable by design and battlefield needs change rapidly.
By establishing manufacturing capabilities closer to where drones will be used, the Army can respond faster to evolving threats, reduce logistical vulnerabilities, and give soldiers the ability to iterate on designs based on real-world feedback. It’s agile manufacturing meets military operations.
This approach also addresses supply chain security concerns. By manufacturing drones in-theater with NDAA-compliant components, the Army reduces dependence on potentially vulnerable international supply chains.
What is Draganfly?
Draganfly was founded in 1998 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Draganfly was building professional-grade drones when most of us were still playing with RC helicopters.
The company went public in 2019 (NASDAQ: DPRO) and has been a steady player in the professional drone market, focusing on public safety, agriculture, industrial inspections and increasingly, defense applications. Draganfly’s drones have appeared in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and the company was credited with the world’s first successful search and rescue mission using a small unmanned aerial system.
What is FPV?
FPV — is short for First Person View. This style of flying used to be primarily the domain of drone racing enthusiasts wearing goggles and flying custom-built quads through obstacle courses at high speeds.
Now comes an example of how innovations from the hobby and racing world have crossed over into professional and defense applications.
As I’ve noted before, many drone companies that started with consumer products have pivoted toward enterprise and military applications. We’ve seen this with companies like Red Cat (parent company of Teal), which sold off its FPV racing brands Fat Shark and Rotor Riot to focus on defense. Meanwhile, Skydio shut down its consumer division to concentrate on enterprise and military customers. Even Parrot, which basically invented the consumer drone market with the AR.Drone, now focuses almost exclusively on enterprise products like the ANAFI USA for government and military use.
The shift makes sense. Military budgets are larger and more stable than consumer markets, security requirements favor American manufacturers, and recent conflicts have proven that drones — particularly FPV drones — are no longer optional battlefield equipment.
What’s next from here?
If this pilot program succeeds, we could see similar embedded manufacturing programs expand to other locations and potentially other military branches. For example, the Air Force has already shown interest in FPV technology through its partnership with the Drone Racing League.
While Draganfly hasn’t disclosed the financial terms of this initial order, the embedded manufacturing model suggests this could be a long-term relationship rather than a one-time purchase. Training Army personnel to manufacture their own drones means Draganfly is positioning itself as an ongoing partner rather than just a vendor.
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