Vector Sells the Pentagon a Subscription to Modern Warfare

In the arithmetic of modern war, a drone design has a shelf life measured in weeks. The Pentagon, by contrast, is built to buy weapons on a calendar measured in years - the standard procurement cycle for a new system runs seven to ten. Vector, a defense manufacturer founded in Utah in 2024, exists in the gap between those two clocks. Its answer is not a faster drone so much as a faster way to sell one: what the company calls "modern warfare as a service."

The idea is simple to state and awkward to pull off. Instead of selling a drone as a one-time piece of hardware, Vector packages the aircraft together with training, tactics, integration and a promise of constant updates, then charges for the whole capability under a single service arrangement. The customer never has to re-run a multi-year procurement every time the technology moves. If it sounds like a software subscription, that is roughly the point.

01What Vector actually does

Vector designs and manufactures small unmanned aerial systems - the class of drone a maneuvering unit can carry, launch and, if necessary, lose. The company describes its product line as the Vector Arsenal. Two systems anchor it. The Hammer is a 10-inch first-person-view quadcopter built for both reconnaissance and strike. The Dagger is an attritable drone aimed at military and law enforcement units that need modular sensing and precision effects in places too dangerous to send people.

"Attritable" is the operative word. These are aircraft designed to be cheap enough to expend - the drone equivalent of ammunition rather than a fighter jet. On the battlefields Vector studies most closely, that economics has become decisive. By some estimates, small drones now account for the majority of casualties in the war in Ukraine, and the cost of stopping an incoming drone versus the cost of the drone itself has turned into a strategic calculation of its own.

The customer list follows from that logic. Vector's primary buyer is the U.S. military, with special operations units at the front of the line, but the company has also pointed its American-made hardware at law enforcement agencies that want small drones without a foreign supply chain attached. More recently it has begun applying the same playbook to the opposite problem - counter-drone systems built to intercept the cheap, incoming "attritable mass" that its own products represent. In a fight increasingly defined by how many low-cost aircraft a side can field and stop, being on both ends of that equation is its own kind of moat.

02The trick inside the Hammer

The Hammer's most interesting feature is not a chip or a camera. It is a spool. Electronic warfare - jamming the radio link between an operator and a drone - is one of the fastest ways to neutralize an FPV aircraft. Vector's answer is to remove the radio from the equation entirely. The Hammer can unreel a physical thread of fiber-optic cable as it flies, keeping a control link that no amount of electronic interference can sever. It flies, in the company's phrasing, "completely radio silent."

The specs around that idea are workmanlike rather than flashy: a five-pound payload for seventeen minutes or more, up to forty minutes of flight, a top speed near 97 miles per hour, and a gimbaled camera that can pick out threats as far as twenty kilometers away. One drone watches; another, carrying a droppable or one-way payload, acts. Vector launched the system in July 2025 and has positioned it for mass production at its Utah facility.

03Why the business model is the real product

Most defense startups chase RDT&E dollars - research, development, testing and evaluation money that funds a program until it doesn't. Vector went after a less glamorous line item: operations and maintenance, the recurring budget the military uses to keep fielded equipment running, the same pool that pays for fuel and spare parts. Selling into O&M funding is what lets Vector behave like a service company instead of a one-shot vendor.

The payoff is speed. A unit under a Vector service agreement can keep receiving current-generation drones, updated tactics and fresh training without waiting on a fresh procurement each cycle. It is a quietly radical rearrangement of how the Pentagon and a supplier relate to each other - and, not incidentally, a stickier business. The drones are disposable; the relationship is designed not to be.

04The people who built it

Vector's founding roster is unusual even by defense-tech standards. CEO Andy Yakulis is a West Point graduate and Army special operations veteran with roughly two decades in uniform who went on to a Stanford MBA. Chief strategy officer Matt Long is a retired Navy SEAL team leader and Silver Star recipient. Co-founder Larsen Jensen is a two-time Olympic swimming medalist who became a Navy SEAL and later a venture investor. And CTO George Matus was a teenage drone prodigy - a Peter Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 who founded the drone company Teal, later acquired by Red Cat, before he could legally rent a car.

That mix - operators who have used the tools and a builder who has shipped them - is the company's stated design philosophy. As Yakulis has put it, the technology is only as good as its tactical application. To keep that connection live, Vector stations engineers with forward teams in Ukraine and Israel, treating active conflict zones as the shortest possible feedback loop between what a drone is asked to do and what the next production run should change.

05Money, in a hurry

Investors moved fast. Vector closed a $61 million Series A in September 2025, roughly 14 months after founding, led by Pelion Venture Partners with a long syndicate behind it - Harpoon Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Shield Capital, Kickstart Fund and others. In March 2026 it added a $20 million debt facility from JPMorgan Chase, earmarked to scale domestic manufacturing and build inventory as demand for American-made small drones climbed.

The same month it announced the Series A, Vector disclosed a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract with U.S. Special Operations Command to supply drones, integration and broader capability delivery - the kind of customer validation that is hard to manufacture. The company has also collected the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering's "Top Gun" Trophy, and holds BlueUAS certification and NDAA compliance, credentials that matter to buyers who cannot route their supply chain through China.

06Where it sits in the market

Vector operates in a crowded and suddenly fashionable field. Anduril, Skydio, Shield AI, AeroVironment, Neros and Red Cat are all chasing versions of the American-made unmanned-systems opportunity, and the low-cost hardware Vector wants to displace has long come from Chinese makers such as DJI. What separates Vector is less any single airframe than the wrapper around it - the service model, the O&M funding strategy, and a team that sells the whole fight rather than a box on a shelf.

Utah turns out to be a deliberate choice rather than a hometown accident. Manufacturing costs run below California's, the state moves quickly on business, and the testing airspace at Dugway Proving Ground and Camp Williams sits close at hand. Vector grew from a handful of people to a full manufacturing operation in under two years, and its ambition - scaling toward tens of thousands of units - depends on all of it holding together at once: the factory, the funding, the contracts and the feedback loop running through two active war zones.

Whether "warfare as a service" becomes the industry's default or a clever footnote is still unsettled. The model works only as long as the Pentagon keeps buying updates instead of finished programs, and as long as Vector can manufacture at the pace it promises. But the bet is legible, and the clock it is racing is not. On today's battlefield, the side that iterates fastest tends to win the next week - and Vector has built its entire company around selling that week, over and over.