Most deployment claims can be resolved in under an hour, because a procurement leaves a paper trail somewhere and marketing does not. The method below is the one used to build the Israeli Defence-AI Deployment Index, and it is published here so that a buyer can verify defence vendor claims without taking anyone's word for it, including this site's. It produces one of four outcomes, and one of them is "nothing published".
Parse the claim before you research it
Read the sentence, not the slide. Deployment language divides cleanly into two grammars.
The first describes an event that happened to a customer: delivered to, ordered by, selected by, in service with, fielded by. Each of those has a date, a counterparty and, usually, a document.
The second describes a property of the product: designed for, ready for, suitable for, proven in, trusted by operators worldwide. None of those has a counterparty. They can be true and still tell a buyer nothing about whether anyone has bought the thing.
Then identify who is speaking. "Battle-proven" and "combat-proven" are adjectives supplied by a marketing department, not records, and they are treated separately in what "battle-tested" means when nobody publishes the test. A vendor announcement hosted on an accelerator's news page is still a vendor announcement. Sightec's announcement of "over 3,000 battle-proven deployments" of its visual navigation software, published through Starburst, is a company statement; the index records the company at L0 because no independent public source corroborates a defence application, not because the statement is disputed.
Where the primary records live
Four repositories carry most of what is publicly checkable.
United States. SAM.gov holds both open solicitations and contract award data; the FPDS ezSearch tool was retired and award search now sits inside SAM.gov's contracting domain. USAspending.gov republishes the same procurement data daily in a form that needs no login. The Congressional Research Service's guide to tracking federal awards explains what each database does and does not contain, including the reporting thresholds that keep small awards out.
European Union. Tenders Electronic Daily, the Supplement to the Official Journal, publishes contract award notices above EU thresholds and is free to search by classification code, authority and value.
Israel. The Ministry of Defense publishes selected procurement and export announcements, including the annual export report, on its own press room.
Listed companies. Where a vendor or its parent is publicly traded, orders material to revenue appear in filings and investor-relations releases with figures attached. Ondas, which owns the Iron Drone Raider counter-drone product, publishes order announcements through investor relations.
Two caveats matter more than the databases. Subcontracted work usually appears under the prime's name, not the vendor's. Classified and government-to-government business frequently appears nowhere at all. An empty search is a finding about publication, not about the company.
Company press release, trade report, or neither
Sort every source you find into three tiers.
Tier one is vendor-issued: press releases, investor updates, conference statements. These are facts about what the company said on a date. They are worth citing, and they should be labelled.
Tier two is trade coverage that restates a vendor announcement without independent attribution. Useful for dating, no stronger than tier one.
Tier three is reporting with its own sourcing — a named outlet describing use or procurement on the strength of something other than the vendor. Read the headline attribution carefully even here. Breaking Defense's report that the US Army was expanding use of SMARTSHOOTER's fire-control system attributes the expansion to the company in the headline itself. That is still a stronger record than a press release, and it is still not the Army saying so.
A four-grade test to verify defence vendor claims
Apply the same filter the index applies, and record the strongest source you found rather than the most recent one.
- L3 · Operational — a named public source reports the system has been used by a military in actual operations.
- L2 · Contract — a publicly announced procurement contract or order exists; no reported operational use.
- L1 · Trial — public trials, pilots, military evaluations or exhibition demonstrations only.
- L0 · Claimed — the company claims a defence application; no independent public source corroborates it.
The full grading rules and the 50 graded entries are published in full. The 13 companies that reach L3 show what the top of that scale looks like in practice.
The boundary that catches people out is the exercise. Unmanned Systems Technology reported D-Fend Solutions' EnforceAir2 being used by the US Army during Combined Resolve 25-02, a training exercise. That is a strong, dated, checkable record of fielding, and under this test it is L2, because an exercise is not operations.
What to ask the vendor directly
Five requests, none of them unreasonable, all of them answerable in writing:
- The URL of the announcement for the contract you are citing, and the name of the customer if it has been published.
- Anything the customer itself has published — a ministry release, a service newsroom item, a parliamentary answer.
- The date of the most recent delivery under that contract, and whether it is still in force.
- A reference customer in a comparable role who will take a call.
- Whether an export licence covering your country exists or has been applied for. The Israeli process, and what a buyer should ask about it, is set out in Israeli defence export controls.
Ask a sixth question of yourself: what would move this vendor from where the record puts them to the next grade up? If the answer is "one published order", the gap is administrative. If the answer is "nothing they are permitted to publish", that is a real constraint and it belongs in the file, not in the discard pile.
Limits of this reading
This method measures publication, not capability. It cannot see classified contracts, undisclosed end users, or the substantial volume of Israeli defence business conducted government to government. It is biased toward English-language sources and therefore under-reads companies whose coverage is Hebrew-only.
It also cannot tell you whether a system performed. A published contract establishes that somebody bought it; a published operational report establishes that somebody used it. Neither establishes that it worked, and the recurring problem of announcements that omit the buyer is treated in the undisclosed-customer problem.
Frequently asked questions
How can a buyer check whether a defence AI contract was really awarded?
Search the primary award databases first: SAM.gov for US contract awards, USAspending.gov for the same data without a login, and Tenders Electronic Daily for EU notices above threshold. If the award exists and is above the reporting threshold, it will carry a date, a value and a contracting authority.
Does a company press release count as deployment evidence?
It counts as evidence that the company made a statement on a date, which is worth recording and worth labelling as company-sourced. It is weaker than an independent report because nothing in it has been checked by a party without an interest in the outcome.
Is a system used in a military exercise considered operational?
Not under this test. Exercises, trials, evaluations and exhibition demonstrations are graded separately from operations. A vendor reported as supporting a named training exercise has a strong, checkable record of fielding, but the index reserves its top grade for reported use in actual operations.
Sources
- idf.ai, The Israeli Defense-AI Deployment Index v1.0, 24 August 2026
- SAM.gov, Contracting domain
- Congressional Research Service, Tracking Federal Awards: USAspending.gov and Other Data Sources
- Tenders Electronic Daily, European Union
- Breaking Defense, Israel's SMARTSHOOTER says US Army expanding use of high-tech fire control system, June 2025
- Unmanned Systems Technology, D-Fend Solutions EnforceAir2 deployed by U.S. Army during Combined Resolve 25-02
- Starburst, Sightec announces over 3,000 deployments of its GPS-free visual navigation technology
- Ondas Holdings investor relations, Ondas secures $3.4 million order for Iron Drone Raider
Independent publication of idf.ai. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Israel Defense Forces, the Israeli Ministry of Defense, or any government body. Compiled entirely from publicly published sources. No classified, restricted or non-public information. Listed companies may dispute any entry: send the published source that contradicts it and the entry will be amended or removed.