The Class of 2027, Graded

Every defense official who stood on a stage in 2023 promised the same thing: by 2027, the drones would be here. With three months left in 2026, we graded every major program against its own promises — and the transcript is more uneven than the press releases suggest.

How We Graded

The rubric is simple. Each program is measured against its own publicly stated timeline, not against an idealized one. A program that slipped and admitted it scores better than one that slipped quietly. Cost realism counts: a drone that meets its schedule at three times the promised unit price is not on schedule. Where 2027 outcomes remain projections, we grade the trajectory — contracts signed, flight hours logged, dollars appropriated — rather than the hope.

One more rule: we grade the program office, not the technology. Several of these systems are excellent aircraft attached to mediocre acquisition plans.

The Honor Roll: CCAs and Small UAS

Collaborative Combat Aircraft, Increment 1: B+. The Air Force's flagship loyal-wingman effort is the closest thing this class has to a valedictorian. General Atomics' YFQ-42A flew in August 2025 and Anduril's YFQ-44A followed in October 2025, both roughly on the schedule set when the companies were downselected in April 2024. Unit cost targets have held in the $25-30 million band — a quarter to a third of an F-35 — which was the entire economic premise. A production decision is expected in FY2026, and fielding around 2027-2028 is credible rather than aspirational. The minus: the Air Force has still not settled how many it will buy, and Increment 2's requirements remain unsettled. On-time, on-budget promises this size have a history of evaporating at the production gate.

Small UAS family-of-systems refresh: A-. This is the quiet success story. The Army's Short Range Reconnaissance program picked the Skydio X10D for Tranche 2 in late 2024, deliveries are flowing, and the unit price sits near $16,000-25,000 per system depending on configuration. The Blue UAS cleared list now runs deep enough that Quantum Systems, Teal, and others are shipping tactical quadcopters and fixed-wings in real volume. Ukraine's battlefield feedback loop — hardened links, cheaper thermal, EW resilience — has been absorbed into these systems in under 24 months, an acquisition speed that would have been unthinkable in 2021. The grade is capped by one unresolved problem: the U.S. still cannot make enough of them. Domestic production capacity remains in the tens of thousands per year against a Ukrainian benchmark its officials claim at over 2 million FPV and strike drones annually.

The Middle of the Class: Replicator and the MQ-25

Replicator Tranches 1 and 2: C+. Announced in August 2023, the initiative promised thousands of attritable autonomous systems by August 2025 at roughly $500 million per year. The department said it met the deadline. What it fielded — Switchblade 600 loitering munitions, Anduril's Ghost-X, uncrewed surface vessels — was real but modest in count, and much of it was repackaged from programs already underway. Replicator 2.0 pivoted to counter-drone defense, a defensible priority shift given that Coyote interceptors and APKWS rockets were chewing through the Shahed/Geran problem at favorable exchange ratios. The honest grade reflects the gap between the rhetoric — a wholesale reconstitution of American mass — and the output, which was a well-executed procurement acceleration of existing inventory.

MQ-25 Stingray: C-. The Navy's carrier tanker drone is the oldest promise in the class and the most quietly revised. The $805 million Boeing EMD contract dates to 2018, with initial operational capability once slated for 2024. First flight of the production-representative aircraft slipped into 2025, and IOC is now a 2027 conversation at best. The aircraft will matter when it arrives — freeing F/A-18s from tanker duty extends the air wing's reach by hundreds of miles — but a program whose schedule has moved right for three consecutive years does not get graded on its concept.

The Quiet F: Heavy Vertical Lift

Heavy VTOL drones: D. This is the seat in the classroom nobody wants to discuss. The Marine Corps' MUX program — a ship-based, Group 5 vertical-lift drone with strike and ISR roles — was effectively dismembered in 2020 into a "family of systems" that never reassembled. The follow-on pieces exist as demonstrations and paper studies. Sikorsky's Nomad family, unveiled in October 2025 as a runway-independent VTOL line, is a genuine attempt to fill the gap, but it is a company-funded offering, not a program of record with a fielding date. The Army's heavy-lift ambitions live inside the manned FLRAA tiltrotor. If a commander in 2027 needs to move 5,000 pounds of cargo to a ship or a contested island without a runway, the answer is the same as it was in 2019: a helicopter, with a crew.

The pattern across the transcript is consistent. Programs with a defined mission, a fixed price, and an existing industrial base — CCA, small UAS — are delivering. Programs that promised a new category of capability from a standing start are the ones slipping or dying quietly.

The class of 2027 taught the Pentagon a lesson it keeps relearning: drones are easy to promise and hard to program, and the distance between a stage and a flight line is measured in appropriations, not applause.

What to Watch, 2026-2028

The next 24 months will determine whether these grades hold or get revised downward. Specific items on the desk's watch list:

- The CCA Increment 1 production contract. If the Air Force commits to more than 100 aircraft at a unit cost under $30 million, the B+ becomes an A. A restructured buy or a cost breach revises it to a C. - Replicator's line-item budget. Watch whether the initiative survives as a funded entity in the FY2027 request or dissolves back into service accounts. Dissolution is the quiet-cancellation signature. - MQ-25 IOC date. Any further slip past 2027 pushes the carrier drone question into the next administration and invites the question the Navy does not want: whether the money migrates to CCAs. - A Group 5 VTOL program of record. The Marine Corps' 2027 budget submission will show whether heavy lift stays a demonstration hobby or becomes a funded line. - Small UAS production capacity. The Army and DLA have signaled industrial-base money; watch actual delivery numbers against the stated need of hundreds of thousands of systems, not the press-release targets.

The programs that graded well did so because someone signed a contract with a number and a date on it. That remains the only reliable leading indicator in this business.