Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

4. Department of Defense · Minor

Increase USMC unmanned aerial and counter-UAS systems

Partially done

116 4. Department of Defense

“Increase the number of Unmanned Aerial Systems and anti-air systems (including counter-UAS systems).”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    CRS records that the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS), the Corps' counter-UAS mount, was integrated with the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment for the first time during Balikatan 25 in the first island chain, and that Force Design's investment line is to double the number of UAS squadrons. Fielding is under way; the doubling is not recorded as achieved.

  2. Partially done

    The reconciliation act (P.L. 119-21) funds both halves of the ask, though only one line is Marine Corps-specific: sec. 20007(15) appropriates $270,000,000 for the development, procurement and integration of Marine Corps unmanned combat aircraft; sec. 20004(56)-(59) appropriates $500,000,000, $350,000,000 (non-kinetic), $250,000,000 (land-based) and $200,000,000 (ship-based) for counter-unmanned aerial systems programs; and sec. 20005(2) puts $1,400,000,000 into the small unmanned aerial system industrial base. No allowlisted source states how many Marine UAS squadrons or counter-UAS systems these buy.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Two instruments: an appropriation (found in the enacted text of P.L. 119-21) and the Corps’ own fielding record — reached first through CRS R47614 v7 and now cited to the Force Design Update itself, since www.marines.mil opens to a normal browser request (the bare hostname does not resolve, which is what the earlier note recorded as a refusal).

  • This is the one page-116 ask with real in-window action on both halves, which is why it is partial rather than Already true like its neighbors.
  • Supporting Primary added 2026-09-03. marines.mil answers a normal browser request; the October 2025 Force Design Update was downloaded and read in full. It carries the fielding CRS describes, in the Corps’s own voice and with dates: G/ATOR at “nearly 60 percent of planned systems will be fielded by the end of FY25”, Organic Precision Fires loitering munitions beginning to field in FY26, MADIS across the MLRs and the MEUs, and a rifle squad with “an added precision fires Marine to operate our small lethal drones”. The exact string “counter-UAS” appears zero times in the document — the systems named are MADIS and G/ATOR, so a keyword search on the Quote’s own phrase returns a false negative. The rung is unchanged: fielding is under way, the doubling of UAS squadrons is not recorded as achieved.
Action
expand
Object
USMC unmanned aerial systems and anti-air systems
ID
225