Defence manufacturer AeroVironment has revealed a new one-way uncrewed aerial system (UAS) the company says can strike targets more than 216nm (400km) away.
Dubbed the Red Dragon, the all-electric loitering munition is designed to provide a massed lethal strike capability that can autonomously navigate to its target, even when faced with electronic warfare and GPS signal jamming.
Notably, AeroVironment – which recently rebranded to become AV after closing an acquisition of fellow defence manufacturer Blue Halo – claims the new munition system has already been combat tested overseas.
“We’ve flown it against the most relevant, current, heaviest jamming environment you can imagine,” says AV chief executive Wahid Nawabi, who spoke to FlightGlobal on 6 May at the Special Operations Forces Week conference in Tampa, Florida.
Nawabi declines to specify to conflict zone in which the Red Dragon prototype was tested. However, the company has been an important supplier to the Ukrainian government since 2022, providing hundreds of AV’s Switchblade series of loitering munitions under contract from the Pentagon.
The US military is also spending more than a billion dollars to buy hundreds of Switchblades for its own use.
Although cheap quadcopter drones have become the signature weapon of the grinding three-year war, many of the uncrewed systems provided by Kyiv’s Western allies have struggled to perform under heavy battlefield jamming by invading Russian forces.
“Testing things in the United States, it doesn’t perform the same when you get it out to the war zone,” says AV programme manager Michael Bigney, in explaining that undesirable outcome.
AV was keen to avoid such a fate with the Red Dragon. Nawabi says the company has been testing the swarmable type for over a year in the unspecified combat theatre.
“We intentionally didn’t want to show it because we wanted to prove it out,” he says.
The product of that effort is a light-weight air vehicle that can fly autonomously using GPS or alternative inertial and visual navigation systems developed in-house by AV.
Standing below a Red Dragon displayed on the show floor at SOF Week, AV’s Jeff Rodrian says the design has now been flown “hundreds, if not thousands of times” in combat.
Rodrian oversees AV’s MacCready Works advanced projects unit.
“It’s intended to be operated in the hardest environments where you have GPS jamming, data links, radios being challenged, jammed and spoofed,” he adds.
In addition to being resistant to electronic warfare, the Red Dragon is also designed around low-cost and commercially available parts for mass-scale production. That offers multiple benefits, including an affordable price point, ease of assembly and fewer restrictions on export sales.
In fact, AV not only plans to offer the Red Dragon for direct commercial sale, but the company also expects its news long-range strike munition will be exempt from the USA’s restrictive International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Better known as ITAR, these rules strictly regulate what American technologies can be sold overseas.
AV says it is the final stages of receiving Blue List approval for the Red Dragon from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. Uncrewed aerial systems included on the Blue List have been certified as not sourcing any critical subcomponents from a list of adversarial countries, including China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
China dominates the market for quadcopters, both for finished vehicles and critical electronic components such as flight controllers, radios, data transmission devices, cameras, gimbals and ground control systems.
The Red Dragon launches using an electrically-powered rail system and is designed to be expendable like AV’s Switchblade family of munitions.
But the Red Dragon offers significant improvements over its predecessor, including a dramatically increased 216nm range, compared to 21nm for the larger Switchblade 600 and 5nm for the smaller Switchblade 300.
The improved capability does not come with a significant increase in operator training requirements. Nawabi estimates a new operator can be trained to field the Red Dragon in around five minutes.
While capable of operating solo, the new system is designed for significant numbers to be fired simultaneously – a tactic Russia has used to deadly effect in Ukrainian cities.
Moscow’s forces have regularly launched mass waves of Iranian Shahed one-way attack drones against civilian and infrastructure targets in Ukraine, with individual strikes often featuring dozens of munitions launched from great distances.
“You’ve got to be able to send in these things at volume,” says Nawabi.
He reveals each set of launch rails can launch Red Dragons at a rate of five vehicles per minute. A concept video shown by AV depicts multiple sets of rails firing in conjunction.
“So within an hour, you can have hundreds or thousands of them out there,” Nawabi notes.
While the long-range munition can perform most of its post-launch duties autonomously, Nawabi notes that a human overseer must still give the Red Dragon a final command before it launches a lethal strike.
The latest product secures AV’s place as a leader in the loitering munition niche, a space it has dominated for several years.
However, with the Blue Halo acquisition complete, Nawabi says the company is looking to expand its portfolio to include unmanned offerings across the air, maritime, ground and space domains.
This notably includes an openness to developing larger, more capable uncrewed aircraft, such as the autonomous fighters being developed by the US Air Force.
“We’re not going to limit to one particular size,” he says. “We are going to continue to grow and expand on both on lower side of the market and the higher side of the market.”
