As an official DIU assessor for the Blue UAS effort, we spend a lot of time on the other side of the table. Here is what the process actually looks like, and where vendors tend to lose time.
It starts before the paperwork
The strongest submissions come from teams that treated cybersecurity and supply-chain provenance as design decisions, not compliance checkboxes bolted on at the end. If those were afterthoughts, it shows.
What we are really checking
- Provenance of components and firmware, all the way down
- Data handling: what the aircraft collects, where it goes, and who can reach it
- Resilience in contested and GPS-denied conditions
How to prepare
Bring documentation you would trust in front of an auditor, and be ready to demonstrate, not just describe. The teams that field capability fastest are the ones who built for this from day one.