Army navigation drill to incorporate new sensors in coming years

The Army’s annual exercise focused on refining its Positioning, Navigation and Timing capabilities, called PNTAX, will widen its aperture in future years, the Army’s new All-Domain Sensing Cross Functional Team lead told Defense News.

The new All-Domain Sensing CFT is now fully established, following the announcement in March it would become Army Futures Command’s latest office to focus on modernization efforts.

The team, created to develop capabilities that will allow the service to understand battlespace goings-on, will initially work toward creating an architecture of sensors as well as processing and disseminating the enormous amount of data collected from those sensors.

The team grew out of the former Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT and took its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanded the mission to focus on broad deep-sensing capabilities.

“I think you’re going to see an evolution of PNTAX probably both in name and also in scope,” Monteleone told Defense News ahead of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. PNTAX stands for PNT Assessment Exercise.

While he said he could not yet divulge details on exactly how the exercise would be evolving, Monteleone said: “It’ll be something different. As we go more and more towards the resilient architectures from space to ground, both in transport and in data, then also as we start augmenting our formations with the human-machine integrated side of it, as we bring more robots, more [unmanned aircraft systems] capability into that architecture, we have to evaluate that in that denied environment.”

PNTAX will also likely be federated into other experiments and activities across the Army as well, Monteleone noted.

The Army just wrapped up its sixth PNTAX at the end of last month. The experiment “continues to deliver more and more value,” Monteleone said, because it offers a realistic threat environment that is “unique.”

There were were over 600 participants in the event, to include joint partners, combatant commands and all of the Five Eyes partners Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, Monteleone said. Over 150 technologies were assessed and over 130 organizations total were on the ground over the three-week evaluation.

While the experimentation effort will evolve to encompass new focus areas within the All-Domain Sensing CFT, the team is not finished working on PNT capabilities even though it has seen successful fielding of a mounted and dismounted PNT system and the CFT has closed up shop.

“There is still a lot of work to be done in PNT,” Monteleone said.

“It’s really focused on what’s next in PNT and also focused on how to leverage exquisite PNT as a system of systems enabler to provide advantage,” he said. “Think of it from the perspective of being able to couple that with communications systems, electronic warfare systems, sensing systems and being able to outmaneuver adversaries, essentially, because I now have the ability to trust my timing source.”

No pilots, all cargo: Airbus tests loading of autonomous helicopter

Airbus U.S. Space and Defense has conducted its first demonstration as part of a program to build an autonomous, uncrewed version of the UH-72 Lakota transportation helicopter for the U.S. Marine Corps.

The Lakota variant, which Airbus calls the UH-72 Logistics Connector, is the company’s bid for the Marines’ Aerial Logistics Connector program, senior manager for business development Carl Forsling said Monday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Annual Meeting and Exhibition in Washington.

Aerial Logistics Connector is one of several Defense Department programs aimed at improving how the military delivers logistical support to troops in distributed environments during a high-intensity conflict.

Airbus built a mockup of an uncrewed Lakota’s internal chassis, with all crew stations removed to make room for cargo throughout the body. Airbus tested it recently at Marine Corps Air Station New River in North Carolina to make sure standard Marine cargo containers and other specialized cargo could be loaded and unloaded from it, Forsling said, though the company declined to say exactly when the demonstration took place.

“Integrating warfighter inputs early on in this phase of the contract helps ensure we’re hitting all the marks and gives us invaluable insights so we deliver the right capabilities to the U.S. Marine Corps,” Rob Geckle, chairman and chief executive of Airbus U.S. Space and Defense.

Airbus aims to have the UH-72 helicopter fly autonomously, Forsling said, and is working with the Marine Corps and other firms to develop the necessary technology. If the Marine Corps or another customer decides they want a piloted version in the future, the design could be adapted to accommodate a human pilot, according to Forsling.

Without the need for a cockpit, this UH-72 would use the space behind its nose for more cargo storage, Forsling said. The nose may open up like a clamshell or swing open to one side on a hinge, he said, but Airbus has not yet decided on the exact configuration.

The ability to front-load cargo into the UH-72 will make it possible to carry larger containers or equipment that would not fit in a normal Lakota’s side doors, according to Forsling. It will also allow users to load cargo into the helicopter with a forklift, he said, and load missiles for transport.

The Marine Corps isn’t currently requiring the UH-72 to fire ordnance, Forsling said. However, the helicopter could be adapted using open systems architecture should the Corps or another future customer decide it needed strike capability, he said.

Demonstrations will continue through the first phase of the middle tier of the acquisition program, which ends in late 2025, Forsling said, and the Marine Corps will then decide whether to move forward with the program and with who. The service aims to have a flying prototype for the Aerial Logistics Connector program in 2028 or 2029 and make a production decision by the end of 2029.

Near Earth Autonomy, Leonardo and Honeywell are also working as a team on the Aerial Logistics Connector program.

Airbus is now in the design phase of this program and doing risk reduction work, focusing on the helicopter itself, Forsling said. As it moves toward the next phase, Airbus is laying the groundwork for autonomous flight, he said.

Forsling said it’s too soon to say how much the UH-72 might cost or whether it would be more or less expensive than the standard Lakota. He declined to comment on whether Airbus has spoken to other services or foreign countries about the UH-72B, but said it would be applicable across the joint environment and with allies.

Soldiers exposed to new combat realities with expanded training

A new approach to training brand new recruits in large-scale combat aims to prepare soldiers for future conflicts as the Army readies the force for a potential slugfest against foes like the Russian or Chinese militaries.

In March, the service launched “Forge 2.5,” another update to “The Forge,” which began as a concept in 2016 with a 96-hour field exercise for week-seven trainees. The Forge has been in place since 2018 as a regular feature of basic training.

The event closely mirrors “The Crucible,” which the Marine Corps instituted in its recruit training in the 1990s. The field endurance test puts recruits in a patrol base, and they run through a variety of combat and logistical scenarios over the course of the four-day stretch.

The Army has graduated 25,000 soldiers through pre-basic prep course

Forge 2.5 ratchets up recruit learning by running large-scale combat operation scenarios, all while involving drill sergeants and company command teams as leaders within the trainee teams.

This structure gives young soldiers firsthand field experience while keeping drill sergeants sharp on basic soldiering and leadership skills, said Gen. Gary Brito, head of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

“What this is meant to do — part one is now immersing soldiers with threat actors from the moment they arrive in the reception company,” Brito said.

Part two of Forge 2.5, which rolled out this year, puts drill sergeants in squad leader positions.

As recently as three years ago, new soldiers conducted events in a fashion resembling a round robin, where individual soldiers would rotate between tasks. Now, every event is collective, and soldiers are always working with and leading small teams, Brito said.

In doing so, recruits are learning more than marching or basic rifle marksmanship, with many completing tasks they would not have encountered until pinning on an NCO rank.

From digital tool signature management to mission planning and order development, the drill sergeants are exposing the new soldiers to more complex considerations as they train, Brito said.

“The trainees are the ones actually executing casualty evaluation, gathering and sending reports, and the drill sergeants are leading them through all those different things they’ve learned so far in the basic combat training portion of [initial training],” said Capt. Julio Sanchez, commander of Company A, 31st Engineer Battalion out of Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

Sanchez’s unit conducted a pilot version of the Forge 2.5 format this year at the home of basic training for most of the Army’s non-combat arms jobs.

And that, Brito said, is why Army leaders must be at the top of their game for when these new soldiers arrive.

“You all will be charged in leading cohesive teams,” Brito said. “Privates will be introduced to why we need to be cohesive and the importance of the battle buddy.”

Brito tied that soldier development back to how the Army is expecting more of lower level tactical leaders, who will have high-level assets such as satellite feeds, drone-based fire support and other tools that soldiers previously never needed to consider.

The new training structure has been implemented at entry-level training at the South Carolina-based Fort Moore and Fort Jackson. It is also part of advanced individual training, or AIT, at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, the four-star said.

AIT remains the follow-on job-specific training soldiers must complete after they graduate from basic training.

Beyond the Forge 2.5 implementation, another program recently surpassed a milestone. The Future Solder Prep course has seen 25,000 soldiers complete entry-level training and join Army units as of this year, Army Times previously reported.

The pre-basic training program began in 2022 to take prospective recruits who did not meet minimum physical or academic standards and give them up to 90 days to reach those standards with the help of Army training staff.

The course is run primarily at Fort Jackson, with two companies of soldiers added to Fort Moore earlier this year, Army Times reported.

New microgrid standard aims to rein in expeditionary-power vendors

The Army is pushing to assert its new standard for connecting battlefield power systems, creating expeditionary microgrids without the constraint of vendor-specific components, according to service officials in the Program Executive Office for Combat Support and Combat Service Support.

“We were seeing a lot of these power systems emerge that were different pieces of a microgrid, but right now, all of the microgrids that are out there use proprietary interfaces to talk,” Cory Goetz, who is the technical management division chief for the Army’s Expeditionary and Sustainment Systems program manager’s office, told Defense News shortly before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

In order to develop the capability to get all of these systems to communicate, Goetz said, the Army decided to develop what it calls the Tactical Microgrid Standard, or TMS, in partnership with industry.

The standard was published officially in 2023, allowing for an open architecture for competitive procurement of power systems that can tie into an expeditionary microgrid architecture, Goetz explained.

“It allows us not to have to pure-fleet everything in the Department of Defense with tactical power. If someone has a good system, say it’s an energy storage system, if they make it with TMS, we can incorporate it into what we do after, of course, verifying it’s compliant,” he added.

The standards initiative is the basis of an effort called the Small Tactical Expeditionary Power, or STEP, project, which consists of small systems with hybrid capability that soldiers can operate quietly, toggling between fuel-burning energy production and batteries, Goetz said.

Then the Army is working on a Universal Power Gateway capability on the TMS basis. Its idea is to tie any power source or power storage capability into the service’s Advanced Medium Mobile Power Source (AMMPS) generator, made by Cummins.

“The UPG, that’s an emerging requirement that we see pointing to a program of record,” Goetz said. “It allows us to tie into those vehicles that will be exporting power in the future, and then be able to hybridize our generators for resilience and efficiency.”

As result, hybrid-electric vehicles would become nodes bundling what are now individual power connections to generators.

The program office is also working to push the microgrid standard to industry “in a more wholesale way, in a more organized way,” Goetz said.

Officials have created a user group, currently counting 40 companies, that they hope will draw relevant companies into a conversation of adopting and advancing the standard.

The program office hopes to field the STEP capability in fiscal year 2028, with the UPG initiative following a year later, though early variants of either project could be ready sooner.

PrimerAI introduces ‘near-zero hallucination’ update to AI platform

An artificial intelligence company that contracts with the U.S. government says its AI system’s analysis of large data sets can produce nearly flawless results.

PrimerAI announced on Oct. 14 that an update to its AI platform can achieve a near-zero hallucination rate, a result that the company believes has broader implications for the Defense Department and defense industry as a whole.

The term “hallucinations” in AI parlance refers to models spitting out incorrect results.

“In high-stakes environments where precision and time lines are crucial, Primer’s enhanced platform emerges as a game changing solution,” the company’s press release said.

PrimerAI CEO Sean Moriarty explained what’s important about the change to the system in a phone interview with Military Times.

While many AI platforms experience a hallucination rate of 10%, Moriarty said, PrimerAI had whittled it down to .3%.

The biggest boon of the update was the ability to fact-check its own results.

This proprietary system, which the company says captures over 99% of errors before they reach users, is called the retrieval augmented generation verification system. Large language models, or LLMs, which are AI systems that can understand and process human language, already use retrieval augmented generation when given a prompt. ChatGPT is a prime example.

What makes PrimerAI’s system novel is that once it generates a response or summary, it generates a claim for the summary and corroborates that claim with the source data, according to Cindy Ma, senior product manager at PrimerAI.

This extra layer of revision leads to exponentially reduced mistakes, said Ma, who provided an in-person demonstration of the system at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 14.

DOD must accelerate AI adoption amid growing threats: PrimerAI CEO

PrimerAI believes that for the Defense Department, providing a large buffer against inaccuracy is paramount because small hallucinations can trigger dramatic responses.

“Imagine a world where an LLM is saying an adversary has five times as many aircraft carriers as they actually have,” Moriarty said.

Moriarty acknowledged that there’s always room for error despite the aim for flawlessness. Even if high-quality reference data is the foundation of an AI system’s analysis, there are still pieces of the puzzle that get warped. Data itself can be tainted by human judgment.

“Our present world is not a zero-defect world, although we strive for zero defects,” Moriarty said.

Army closes in on autonomous boats to ferry supplies into battle

The Army is developing requirements to distribute supplies to troops on the battlefield in a contested environment using a network of autonomous boats and aircraft, according to the general in charge of logistics modernization.

“Our focus is an ecosystem looking at how we improve the supply chain, but also ensuring that we could keep that supply chain in motion — given a peer adversary like China — [when] we’re not able to [establish] fixed sites and keep them there for long periods of time,” Brig. Gen. Shane Upton, the Contested Logistics Cross Functional Team lead within Army Futures Command, told Defense News.

“Quite frankly, the lessons we’ve seen in Ukraine, the lessons we’re seeing recently in the Middle East — if it’s static for too long, especially resupply or logistics nodes, it becomes a target,” he said.

Upton’s team soon plans to take an abbreviated capabilities document on requirements for autonomous watercraft to the Pentagon for approval.

Smaller, autonomous watercraft, particularly in the Pacific, present a dilemma to adversaries “if there’s enough of them out there,” Upton said.

“You really don’t know which one to target,” he added. “Also, unmanned air systems that move cargo off those systems onto land — or even to a point of need directly to widely, distributed forces — [are] a focus area.”

The other near-term pursuit for using autonomous systems to distribute supplies will be larger cargo drones with greater range, he added. The team is writing a capabilities document to define those characteristics as well.

The Army demonstrated cargo drones at Project Convergence, the service’s periodic effort to experiment with future concepts and capabilities.

“We’ve rapidly seen the need that we absolutely want to use [unmanned aircraft systems] in supply and distribution, but it has to have more capacity and range than some of the smaller ones,” Upton said. “The smaller [craft] are very purpose built and very effective for [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance], lethal effects. They’re low cost. They can be attritable. When we’re talking about moving [supplies], we need a greater capacity for lift and they’ve got to go longer ranges.”

Upton attended an industry meeting just prior to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference with an eye on larger cargo option developments as his team works to design an ecosystem of autonomous supply delivery.

Watercraft systems were already taking a huge step forward through extensive development work by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps prior to the establishment of the Army’s Contested Logistics CFT, which was almost two years ago.

The industry for small, autonomous watercraft is growing, Upton added, and there are several companies that have gone from creation to having boats in the water in less than a year.

After one particular company stood up, less than six months elapsed before it was conducting experiments with the Navy in the Atlantic Ocean. The organization now has the ability to make several hundred boats a month, Upton said.

Another consideration with cheap autonomous vessels is the possibility of using them as decoys. The Navy and Marine Corps are also looking into the possibility of adding lethal effects to some of the watercraft, Upton said.

Advancements in larger cargo drones and faster craft are coming as well, he noted following a recent meeting with industry developing systems in the commercial space.

Upton cited additional emerging tech features, such as hydrogen-powered drones that can travel 1,000 miles and carry 1,000 pounds, as promising developments.

US Army aims to pick a robotic combat vehicle vendor next spring

The Army plans to choose next spring one winner out of four vendors competing to build the base platform for its Robotic Combat Vehicle, or RCV, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems.

A year ago, the Army selected McQ, Textron Systems, General Dynamics Land Systems and Oshkosh Defense to design and build prototypes for the system.

The Army decided then to adjust its pursuit of three robotic combat vehicles of different sizes, moving forward instead with a single size that can keep up with crewed combat vehicles, Dean said at the time. And then the Army would equip the platform with different mission payloads to fill specific battlefield roles.

Each vendor delivered two prototypes in August, and all of the prototypes are now at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, Dean said.

“We’re on track to down-select in about the March timeframe from those four vendors to one and that’ll give us the base platform,” Dean said.

The chosen vendor will deliver eight prototypes for the next phase. “Then once we have that, that vendor will actually do another prototype spin. … We’ve tiered the requirements so they’re going to add some new requirements when they go into the second prototypes.”

While Dean said he prefers to keep as many vendors in a development effort as long as possible, funding is always a consideration. “It does come down to money. There’s a profile that we have to stay within. Unfortunately, the profile that we have really almost only allowed us to retain one. We looked at at least two and then that was still outside what we were able to afford.”

Who’s in control?

The Army has also settled on the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle, or AMPV, as the designated control vehicle for the robots, chosen because the control vehicle needs to keep up with the first unit designated to receive the robots, which will be a platoon in an Armored Brigade Combat Team, according to Col. Kevin Bradley, who is in charge of next-generation combat vehicle modernization within Army Futures Command.

The service looked at a number of concepts for a control vehicle from Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles to Stryker combat vehicles to even a truck-based one, but “the user community gelled on what they wanted,” Dean said.

A unit that has been working through how to operate and fight with RCVs at the National Training Center, for one, said using a control vehicle that was different from anything else in the formation became “very easy to target,” and the opposing force in a recent training event would go after the control vehicle easily to take the robots, according to Bradley.

The RCV’s first fielding is expected in fiscal 2028, which means the control vehicle will need to go under contract in FY25 because the AMPV has a two-year production lead time. Then from FY27 to FY28, the integration work to make it a control vehicle will occur, Dean detailed.

Tough road

While the RCV base platform prototyping and the control vehicle effort is moving forward smoothly, the Army’s work to develop off-road autonomy software is proving more difficult.

In June the Army conducted an off-road autonomy software assessment. “The good news is we are moving forward in that area. The bad news is industry is nowhere near where people think in terms of off-road autonomy. There’s still a lot of development to do,” Dean said.

The Army plans to hold another evaluation in December which will become routine in order to continue software development.

Three companies are working directly with the Bradley’s Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team and PEO GCS on autonomy capability – Forterra, Kodiak Robotics and Overland AI.

So far the evaluations for autonomous behavior haven’t even been truly off-road, Dean said. “We’re talking trails and unimproved road conditions. Building an autonomy algorithm that can identify the entire range of things it might encounter is challenging because you have a pretty big data set.”

The evaluation in June took place at Fort Cavazos, Texas, and in one instance the robot needed to cross a creek at the bottom of a hill and would need to navigate a series of switchbacks to get down. “It couldn’t navigate the switchbacks,” Dean said.

“We are still working through the negative obstacle problem. You see a dip ahead of you. It could be a puddle, I can drive right through it, or it could be a cliff, and the sensors sometimes have difficulty evaluating what’s safe to navigate,” he said.

The evaluation in June involved too much human intervention, Dean said, but it’s still better than having to tele-operate a system continuously and deal with latency issues at certain ranges and speeds.

Overall, based off a major training event at Fort Irwin, California, this summer “we saw that robots provided benefits to the organization particularly in the reconnaissance and security role for long-duration observation and security posts,” Bradley said.

But the service is still working through tradeoffs with power, range and the ability to make decisions at a distance and the desired level of control, he added.

“That was really what we were trying to tease out, that math problem of you want to be able to see 4K video to make decisions of shoot, don’t shoot, to maintain that kind of ethical high ground, then that requires a certain amount of bandwidth that’s impacting how far you can go, also impacts how much control you have,” Bradley said.

Take notes, a formation like this could be coming to your unit soon

In the piney woods of Louisiana, one brigade’s new approach to reconnaissance recently illustrated the Army’s plan to undertake more complex and demanding missions with new tech and fewer soldiers.

The 2nd Mobile Brigade Combat Team, or MBCT, with 101st Airborne Division carried out their rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center in August, the culmination of months of planning, new equipment training and restructuring.

The brigade is one of three selected by the Army chief of staff to be the focus of his “Transformation in Contact” initiative, which seeks to deliver new equipment to units as they increase their readiness and prepare for deployments.

This exercise is shaping the long-term future of Army brigades

Even MBCT’s designator is new to the Army, which has operated under the brigade combat team construct since the early 2000s. However, those teams have been equipment-focused with Stryker Brigade Combat Teams, Armored Brigade Combat Teams and Infantry Brigade Combat Teams.

The “mobile” in MBCT is mostly about giving soldiers smaller off-road capabilities, such as the Infantry Squad Vehicle, to move soldiers faster with a smaller footprint.

And moving fast with a smaller footprint is the sole purpose of the MBCT’s newest creation: the Multifunctional Reconnaissance Company, or MFRC. The recon company combines existing soldier specialties with new equipment to detect and destroy enemy threats using small, mobile teams.

Capt. Charlie O’Hagan led the 2nd MBCT’s recon company during the recent rotation. They built three “hunter killer platoons” that can break into smaller reconnaissance nodes and augmented the teams with small drones and added an electromagnetic warfare specialist to each team within the company.

The purpose is clear — save lives.

“We’re using drones and sensing to increase standoff, that’s how we’re leveraging all this equipment to limit bloodshed,” O’Hagan said.

The company saw huge gains when they were able to shrink their command footprint by using commercial satellites such as StarShield instead of larger, trailer-hauled legacy military satellites.

Capt. Cory Mullikin, a brigade data systems engineer, said the entire command post could be set up or torn down in 10 to 20 minutes compared to 45 minutes with the old gear.

“I pick a location when we come; I know exactly where to set up, pull it out and plug it in,” Mullikin said. “Everything is pretty much dashboard in there, our only time constraint is running the fiber.”

The dashboard capabilities meant a four-Humvee detachment could hold the entire brigade command post. The recon teams could then move in even smaller Infantry Squad Vehicle formations.

With less equipment and fewer personnel, the recon company was able to remain in the field without a resupply for more than nine days. That’s two to three times longer than a unit of that size could typically operate without needing water and fuel.

The origins for the multifunctional recon company come from the 75th Ranger Regiment, which developed a similar concept on a team level.

Capt. Jonathan Paul leads Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment. His company has been organized around the multifunctional concept — taking infantry soldiers, snipers, scouts and electronic warfare soldiers and merging them into one unit that can collect data, sense enemy activity and call in fires rapidly.

In early 2023, the company saw small recon elements from the regiment get behind enemy lines during force-on-force exercises at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, Paul said. In one example, the unit was able to disrupt the entire enemy brigade by using two 12-soldier teams and a single 81mm mortar attachment, Paul said.

That’s two dozen soldiers stalling an enemy force of 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers. Usually, such a feat would require a battalion’s worth of soldiers, according to Paul.

Reconfiguring job skills within a multifunctional company for the 101st Airborne saw quick success.

Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, 101st Airborne Division commander, told reporters at the JRTC event that 101st Airborne recon company soldiers were able to use an artificial intelligence application known as “Shrike,” developed by the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Center, to speed up their fires missions.

Shrike was installed on unit drones using a small circuit board. Soldiers then flew the drone over the enemy’s motor pool, allowing the device to scan vehicles and identify them in the field.

With this app, soldiers could identify and generate an automated call for fire mission in less than a minute. By comparison, the Army standard is five to eight minutes, with some leaders admitting it can take a team up to 15 minutes.

The app also conducts an immediate battle damage assessment and then generates additional call for fire missions to take out any missed or still functioning targets.

Soldiers in the recon company also used the electromagnetic spectrum to exhaust the enemy’s shooters.

The brigade brought 250 homemade electronic decoys, programmed to appear as sensors much like a command post would look on the battlefield. They’d drop these sensors in the woods, creating clusters for the enemy units to target — and they did.

“The enemy spent 50% of their artillery against the dirt where we had those decoys,” Col. James Stultz, 2nd MBCT commander, said of one such engagement.

AeroVironment pitches Army drone for quick battlefield changes

The California-based firm AeroVironment has developed an autonomous, all-electric uncrewed aircraft that users can rapidly convert from a reconnaissance unit to a strike drone — on the battlefield and without tools in a matter of minutes.

AeroVironment, which specializes in small and medium drones, uncrewed ground vehicles and loitering munitions like the Switchblade, created the P550 drone as a candidate for the Army’s Long Range Reconnaissance program.

One of the company’s top priorities — and a key lesson it took from customers who used its other drones — was to make the P550 easily adaptable and allow integration of multiple capabilities, product line manager Cris Cornell said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

“The battlefield changes so quickly, things need to be adaptable very quickly,” Cornell said.

The P550 is designed with modular open systems architecture principles to allow users to quickly hot swap payloads such as batteries, sensors and other equipment in the field in less than five minutes, he added. Hot swapping refers to a component being added or replaced without shutting the system down.

The P550 will be able to conduct strike missions, Cornell said, but won’t be a one-way loitering munition like the Switchblade. Instead, he described it as a “miniature bomber” that could drop weapons, such as mortars, on enemy targets.

AeroVironment has already integrated the Shryke precision munition, made by L3Harris Technologies and Corvid Technologies, onto the P550, Cornell said, and is talking with other companies on pairing additional munitions with the platform.

CACI’s Pit Viper electronic warfare module is another outside capability that AeroVironment has integrated into the P550, Cornell said.

AeroVironment also partnered with Parry Labs to integrate digital engineering, software and mission system hardware into the P550 to make it easily adaptable.

Users would slide new payloads, including weapons, into the P550 “almost like sliding a drawer,” Cornell said, which would then latch into place. To remove most payloads, he said, the user simply pushes a release button and pulls the unit out.

For safety reasons, removing unfired weapons would be a more detailed process, Cornell said, requiring the use of a tool to ensure weapons don’t slip off.

The P550 can carry up to 15 pounds of payload, according to AeroVironment. Its all-electric propulsion system allows it to fly for up to five hours and up to 60 kilometers.

AeroVironment largely used a fresh design for the P550, but incorporated elements from previous drones like autopilots, sensors and navigation systems.

Ukraine’s experience during the last two-plus years of war with Russia has demonstrated how vital drones are to modern war, Cornell said, and how rapidly troops need to be able to adapt those drones.

“Robotics are being used on the battlefield in ways that none of us thought possible even a few years ago,” Cornell said.

AeroVironment hopes the Army will choose the P550 for its Long Range Reconnaissance program, but Cornell said other services, U.S. civilian organizations and nations have also expressed interest. He declined to say which countries are eying the P550. AeroVironment has briefed Ukraine’s government on the P550, Cornell said, and will continue to assist the nation in its fight against Russia.

Ukraine has used AeroVironment’s two models of Switchblade drone — the smaller Switchblade 300 and the larger Switchblade 600 — to great effect, and raised the company’s profile considerably.

The Pentagon in August awarded AeroVironment a $990 million contract to make Switchblades for infantry units to target tanks, personnel carriers and other enemy targets. And the Army plans to field more than 1,000 Switchblades as part of the Pentagon’s Replicator program.

Cornell would not say how much the P550 costs.

AeroVironment plans to build the P550 in Simi Valley, California, Cornell said, and would be ready to start delivering the first units in early 2025.

Army speeds up development of multipurpose ‘launched effects’

With funds freed up from the U.S. Army’s aviation rebalance earlier this year, the service will move more quickly on Long-Range Launched Effects development and procurement, according to the Army’s program executive officer for aviation.

Launched Effects, or LE, is the service’s term of art for an envisioned unmanned segment among its aerial platforms, capable of delivering a wide range of capabilities such as targeting, reconnaissance, surveillance, network extension or kinetic strike. Launched Effects can be deployed from both air and ground vehicles.

The effort represents a new direction in the Army’s aviation portfolio, which prioritizes drones and the more loosely defined category of LE platforms as the tip of the spear in enemy contact.

“We were able to accelerate the long-range efforts by about a year,” Brig. Gen. David Phillips told Defense News in an interview before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

This means the Army will likely put out a request for proposals for what is considered more of a Corps-level asset in the third quarter of fiscal 2026. The service was originally looking at focusing on small and medium launched effects first and had yet to secure funding for the long-range version.

At the same time, the Army is making sure it is collaborating with the joint force to ensure it is not duplicating efforts.

“We have been paying close attention to the maturity of longer-range capability,” Phillips said.

The Army also continues to mature its medium-range capability which is in a prototyping effort well underway using Anduril Industries’ Altius 700 aircraft. Collins Aerospace, a Raytheon Technologies company, is the mission system provider, and Aurora Flight Sciences is the system integrator. Technology Service Corp. and Northrop Grumman Information Systems are providing modular payloads.

“We completed some additional flight testing off of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, last month and we’re looking at a way to deliver that capability faster,” Phillips said.

The medium-range LE will also be developed in conjunction with Program Executive Office Missiles & Space to fill its requirement for a helicopter-fired Long-Range Precision Munition.

The service was debating whether it made sense to pursue a separate LRPM program through PEO M&S or if the capability essentially could be classified as an LE and was therefore a redundant effort.

The Army’s ruling is that “it is a Launched Effects Medium Range. It’s captured in that requirement and that’s [how] we’re going to go about the acquisition process,” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, who overseas the programs and resources division of the Army staff at the Pentagon, told Defense News.

As part of the requirement, the Army is looking at ways to accelerate the lethal version of the medium-range LE to meet the service’s need for an air-launched precision munition.

“We’re being more efficient and effective that way,” Phillips said.

The Army has already issued a request for white papers for a short-range LE.

“We’re squarely in the evaluation space,” Phillips said.

The service plans to launch an effort late this year or early next year that will lead to a user demonstration aimed at getting feedback from the force.

The method is similar to what the service has done with other small, unmanned aircraft systems efforts. “That may sound familiar, that model, but it’s working for us in the small UAS space,” Phillips said.