Every UASFeed story on U.S. Army — across defense, counter-UAS, industry, commercial, policy, and tech, newest first.
The Army says its first Enduring-High Energy Laser counter-drone weapons could reach soldiers as early as December 2027 to January 2028, and no later than spring 2028. They will be built on AeroVironment's LOCUST X3 under a $464.8M deal that AV calls the first US production contract for laser weapons.
Read the story →The Army has a new autonomy command, breaching tests under way at Fort Bragg and a lab study showing 13 soldiers can run a mixed robotic formation. The open question is whether autonomy can grow from single robots to whole formations.
Raytheon's company-funded Coyote Block 2C+RM trades the interceptor's turbojet for a solid rocket motor plus a new seeker and warhead. It has flown three developmental tests and is aimed at faster jet-powered attack drones, but no US military contract for it has been confirmed.
Germany's army will form its first drone regiment in 2027. It will start with 300 to 350 soldiers and grow to as many as 600 under the 10th Panzer Division. The same year, the US Army took the drone mission away from a paratrooper battalion of roughly that size.
The Army has picked American startup Vulcan Elements to supply the neodymium magnets for SkyFoundry's drone motors, another link in an effort to build a small-drone supply chain with no Chinese components.
DroneShield says DroneSentry-X Mk2 reached initial operational capability on U.S. Army Infantry Squad Vehicles about 80 days after a JIATF-401 award, with three more units planned. Contract value, first-batch size and performance specifications were not disclosed.
AeroVironment posted 6% revenue growth in fiscal Q1 2027 and guided to $2.125-2.225 billion for the full year, days after a $464.8 million Army laser-weapon contract and a record fiscal 2026 backlog.
The Army has narrowed its IFPC Increment 2 interceptor competition to Lockheed Martin and a Boeing-Anduril team, dropping Rafael's US arm as the program moves toward a competitive demonstration to fill the air-defense gap below Patriot and THAAD.
The Army's TITAN ground-station program has left prototyping for full production, with Anduril taking a $65M hardware slice to build eight new mobile intelligence nodes alongside Palantir's software lead.
Six months after launch, the Army's UAS Marketplace has moved past $750 million in sales and is expanding from small Group 1/2 drones to systems weighing up to 1,320 pounds, with the UK and other allies exploring access.
AeroVironment's LOCUST directed-energy counter-drone laser scored its first international sale, worth more than $50 million, barely a week after the US Army handed the company its first-ever production contract for a high-energy laser weapon.
Duke University will lead a six-year, $24 million Army-funded effort called ICE-CEM to detect, disrupt and seize control of hostile drones using cyber and radio-frequency techniques rather than kinetic interceptors.
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