The U.S. Air Force’s interceptor drone deal with Trump‑backed Powerus tightens family links to the Pentagon as Washington pivots to cheap AI drones against Iran.
Summary
- The U.S. Air Force has agreed to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from Powerus, a defense startup backed by President Donald Trump’s sons, as the U.S.–Iran war enters its third month.
- Powerus co‑founder Brett Velicovich said the West Palm Beach-based firm will sell its drones to the Pentagon after a demonstration in Arizona, marking the company’s first contract to provide weapons to the U.S. military.
- The deal comes as Washington leans on cheap interceptor drones, including 10,000 AI-equipped Merops systems developed in Ukraine, to counter Iranian Shahed-style attack drones without burning through multimillion‑dollar missile stockpiles.
The U.S. Air Force has struck a weapons procurement agreement with Powerus, a drone company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons, further tightening ties between the Trump family’s business interests and the Pentagon as the U.S.–Iran war grinds into its third month.
Powerus signs first U.S. military weapons contract
According to Bloomberg, the Air Force has agreed to purchase an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from the West Palm Beach-based firm, which is supported by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. through their investment vehicle Aureus Greenway Holdings.
Powerus co-founder and president Brett Velicovich told Bloomberg the company will sell the drones to the Pentagon after a demonstration at a facility in Arizona, describing the agreement as Powerus’s first contract to sell weapons to the U.S. military.
He declined to disclose the scope or value of the order, and officials did not comment on quantities, but the report notes that the Pentagon often makes limited purchases when evaluating new systems before committing to larger programs of record.
Cheap interceptors for a drone-saturated war
The contract underscores how the U.S. is racing to field cheaper counter‑drone options as Iran and its proxies lean heavily on low-cost Shahed-style one-way attack drones in the current conflict.
Analysts and officials have warned that firing multimillion‑dollar Patriot or THAAD interceptors at $30,000 drones is economically unsustainable, pushing the Pentagon toward smaller, expendable systems that can be deployed in large numbers.
That shift is already visible on the battlefield. In March, Ukrainian and U.S. officials said Washington had rushed roughly 10,000 AI-enabled Merops interceptor drones, originally developed and combat-tested in Ukraine, to the Middle East to protect U.S. forces and partners from Iranian drone swarms.
Reports from the manufacturer and defense analysts say Merops units combine a command station, launch platforms, and fleets of autonomous interceptors that rely on onboard machine vision rather than GPS or satellite links, allowing them to hunt and destroy drones even in heavily jammed environments.
The system has reportedly scored more than 1,000 kills against Russian and Iranian-made drones in Ukraine and has now been deployed in Poland, Romania, and U.S. bases across the region, illustrating how quickly novel counter‑drone tools can move from experimentation to mass deployment.
For Powerus, the new Pentagon deal comes just weeks after Bloomberg reported the startup was also pitching weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates, including an interceptor drone designed to target Iranian Shahed‑136s.
With Trump family-backed investors now funding a company selling drones into an active conflict shaped by U.S. policy decisions, ethics and oversight questions are likely to follow, even as military planners race to close the cost and capability gap against Iran’s expanding drone arsenal.
