Quote:Military combat drones keep getting better, cheaper and more dangerous. Unmanned aircraft are now affordable enough for terrorist groups such as Islamic State to procure large quantities of them. Meanwhile, the best counter systems cost many millions of dollars to deploy and use. It’s an out-of-whack equation that military analysts say will likely become only more troubling over time, in terms of both costs and the threats to the safety of ground troops.

Anduril Industries Inc., a startup in Southern California fashioning itself as a new-age defense technology and weapons maker, has created a product dubbed Roadrunner that it bills as an answer to the US’s rising drone threat. Developed in secret over the past two years, a Roadrunner is akin to a mini, autonomous fighter jet. Powered by two turbines and equipped with a warhead, it takes off vertically like a rocket and then turns to fly at hundreds of miles per hour like a plane toward its target. And, in a first for this type of weapon, a Roadrunner can return home, land and be reused when it doesn’t engage a target in the air.

Although Anduril declined to disclose a price, it says each Roadrunner will cost in the “low six figures.” A Patriot missile—the US military’s higher-end drone deterrent—can fetch four times that amount. The company, based in Costa Mesa, California, has set up a new factory line for manufacturing and expects the cost of each Roadrunner to drop as it ramps up production and improves underlying technology. “It’s radically different than anything people have been doing,” says Palmer Luckey, a co-founder of Anduril.

The US currently has about 3,500 troops in Iraq and Syria, and drones launched by Islamic State and Iran-backed militias are a growing threat. American forces in those two countries were hit by 78 drone attacks from the start of 2021 to March 2023. In just the last few weeks, there have been more than 55 attacks. The bombings have resulted in dozens of wounded soldiers, including at least 45 with traumatic brain injuries, according to news reports and military analysts. “We are definitely seeing a spike in attacks,” says Zachary Kallenborn, a weapons innovation analyst at George Mason University. (Spokespeople from the US Central Command didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Combat drones have improved in part because of advances in the consumer market. Ukraine is producing as many as 10,000 quadcopter drones per month using consumer electronics parts, some with bombs duct-taped to their underbelly. Even these crudely cobbled-together drones are able to tap GPS satellites to perform precise maneuvers and work together in groups. “They are cheap, reliable, quiet and really difficult to identify,” says a US service member with battlefield experience in Iraq and elsewhere, who requested anonymity because of military sensitivity. “With their artificial intelligence software, they can swarm together and identify targets. It’s pretty incredible.”

Many of the recent attacks in Iraq and Syria are the result of more sophisticated fixed-wing drones. In both countries, militias are beginning to strike with multiple drones at once, a technique known as a swarm assault. “Nobody has had the quantity of vehicles or the technology to orchestrate the swarm attacks, but that’s all changing,” Luckey says. “That’s obviously what the future is.”

US troops have a variety of means at their disposal to counter drone attacks, including shooting down the aircraft with rifles and technology that disrupts the communications and navigation systems on the drones. To take out fixed-wing drones in the Middle East, troops have also relied on an unmanned aircraft system called Coyote, made by RTX Corp. [Raytheon Technologies], and larger Patriot missiles. These weapons, however, are much more expensive than the aircraft they’re targeting. “The cost equation is perhaps the hardest part of countering drones,” Kallenborn says. “A Patriot missile can cost $4 million a shot, whereas an Iranian drone might only cost $10,000 or less. Shooting the drone down might be a tactical success, but over time, the costs are high and may drain stocks needed for more significant missile and aircraft threats.”

Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has argued that it’s a new type of defense contractor. Instead of taking orders upfront from the US Department of Defense to fund development of products, Anduril has raised money from venture capitalists, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, that it uses to build weapons it predicts the military will want. Its first product was an automated security tower designed for the US border in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency. The company then began shipping early counter-drone aircraft to the US and UK militaries in 2019.

The US government has bought various Anduril products for use on the US border and in Ukraine and elsewhere; to date the company has manufactured hundreds of hardware systems and remains much smaller than major military contractors such as RTX’s Raytheon. Thomas Karako, a senior fellow and director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, says Anduril still needs to prove its manufacturing chops and deal with the practical details of getting troops accustomed to its new weapons. “I would caution against the idea that there’s a quick fix here or some new product that can make all your problems go away,” he says. “This stuff is hard.”

Anduril started work two years ago on the Roadrunner, a Looney Tunes-inspired dig at Raytheon’s Coyote, because it said the US would need a lower-cost, more nimble way to combat swarms. The tiny fighter jet has a carbon-fiber body and onboard electronics that let it track objects and perform maneuvers that’d be too dangerous for a human-piloted plane. One of its main advantages is that it can be reused, which makes it easier to launch at the first sign of an unknown object. “If you see a threat, you can launch multiple Roadrunners to go out to do a closer inspection of that threat and be loitering in case they’re needed,” says Christian Brose, the chief strategy officer at Anduril. “You can recall them, land them, refuel them and reuse them, so, essentially, you can launch without regret.”

In a test conducted in November at a site known as Jackass Flats in the mountainous desert surroundings of the Nevada National Security Site, Anduril set up a Roadrunner launch. One of the company’s long-range sentry towers sat perched on a small hill and used its radar and other sensors to scan the sky, while a test pilot stood in front of a laptop screen running Anduril software.

To start the test, Anduril sent a fixed-wing drone into the air from a runway behind its compound. The sentry tower quickly detected the aircraft and fed information about its speed and trajectory into the company’s Lattice software. The test pilot received imagery of the drone and then manually marked it as a hostile threat. In an instant, the lid of the Roadrunner launch container opened, the turbines fired up and the craft zipped into the air. It took off toward the target and then began feeding its own sensor data and imagery into Lattice. As the Roadrunner closed in on the target, the test pilot gave a final command to destroy the fixed-wing craft, and, seconds later, the Lattice software displayed information showing that it had been a successful attack.

For the purposes of this demonstration, Anduril used proximity sensors to confirm that it would have taken out the target and didn’t actually blow up the fixed-wing craft. If it had, the Roadrunner wouldn’t have been able to do what it did next: It turned to fly back toward the Anduril compound, shifted into a vertical position and fired its thrusters toward the ground as landing legs kicked out from its side. During a maneuver lasting about a minute, the machine got ever closer to the ground before finally settling gently on a small concrete pad in a fashion very similar to a Space Exploration Technologies Corp. rocket. A future version of the Roadrunner will be able to land even after destroying a target, Luckey says.

The whole idea, as Anduril sees it, is to allow a single operator to manage dozens or more Roadrunners in the field with Lattice providing a full view of the surroundings, targets and weapons available. If a drone swarm approaches a base, Lattice will quickly see and identify all the drones, and, with a couple of clicks, the operator can send Roadrunners off to combat the threat. This is a major change from many of the other counter-drone weapons that require about a dozen people to operate them. Anduril says it’s not allowed to say which branch of the military has ordered Roadrunners, but the weapon will be in the field early next year, Brose says.

Anduril’s full arsenal of products includes autonomous submarines, autonomous fighter jets and loitering munitions. The company expects that some of the key components it developed for the Roadrunner, such as the aircraft’s turbines and motors, will soon go into other products. “I’m not aware of anyone ever building a faster starting engine or a motor that has this much power in such a small package,” says co-founder Luckey. “We’ve got five products coming designed around this exact same engine.”

Anduril has raised $2.7 billion to date and is valued at almost $10 billion. Brose acknowledged that Anduril has yet to fully prove its manufacturing mettle but argued that starting from scratch gives the company an edge over traditional contractors that have older weapons and factories they must support. “We’re not trying to retrain an old workforce in new methods or trying to retrofit something,” Brose says. “We are building new facilities, new factories, new manufacturing lines, and I think that is a very liberating position to be in.”