One of my personal missions at AUSA was to seek out truly attritable drones. One of the things I’ve taken away from the war in Ukraine is that with a consumption rate in excess of 10,000 per month, the attritable drone is the 155 shell of the future. These small, low-cost, disposable unmanned aerial systems are upending how we will conduct warfare. They are highly adaptable and are under constant revision as enemy TTPs adapt to their use. We’ve got to have something just as robust. In the hands of innovative American troops like SOCOM’s new robotics specialists, drones will be devastating.
Attritable, or consumable, apparently means a lot of things to a lot of people. For instance, when the Defense Innovation Unit’s Replicator initiative went to industry seeking out attritable drones they ended up buying AeroVironment Switchblade-600 loitering munition. A fine weapon to be sure, but our nation can hardly afford to expend them at the rate seen in Ukraine. If anything, our future adversaries are going to throw an order of magnitude more at us and we’ll need to be able to respond in kind.
One of the examples I ran across is from Australian small business DefendTex. They first impressed me years ago with their innovative Drone40.
The Vengeance is a First Person View drone manufactured in Australia and has been submitted to the US for Blue certification.
Offered in 7″, 8″, 10″, and 13″ models, it can carry up to 10kg of explosive ordinance over a distance greater than 20kms.
It is built with a goal of around $1000 per copy in mass production and features simple construction using zip ties in some instances and a single circuit board integrating flight control, ESC, OSD, VTX connector and servo output.
Although it is an FPV drone, it can be configured for autonomous terminal guidance as well as swarm tactics.
This is the bee’s knees as the grey hairs used to say.
Them’s the cat’s pajamas, young man.