Every offensive drone dollar Washington spends now spawns a defensive one right behind it. The Pentagon's FY2026 budget request carries roughly $3.1 billion specifically for counter-unmanned aircraft systems, and the FY2026 NDAA centralized the whole effort under a new Joint Interagency Task Force (JIFT-401) tasked with validating counter-drone systems and consolidating procurement. The mechanism is mechanical, not cyclical: cheap first-person-view drones from Ukraine to the Middle East to the southern border have made "detect, track, defeat" as urgent a budget line as the drones themselves — and Congress is explicitly folding UAS, counter-UAS, and electronic warfare funding into shared categories rather than one-off named programs, which favors incumbents with modular hardware over single-program primes.