The math has been bad for years, and everyone in the counter-drone business knows it. A Shahed-136 or Geran-2 style one-way attack drone can be built and fielded for somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000. Shooting one down with a legacy U.S. air defense interceptor can cost anywhere from $1 million to $4 million. Even the purpose-built Coyote interceptor, the Army's go-to answer for smaller drone threats, runs $100,000 to $150,000 per round — three to four times the cost of the thing it's killing.
That cost-imbalance problem, laid out in an Aug. 5 Stars and Stripes report, is now driving two separate but related Army pushes. One is a fire-control upgrade the Army's Armaments Center detailed in late June 2026 and is still refining through testing. The other, a formal industry solicitation for a cheaper missile that doesn't exist yet, surfaced in the first week of August 2026.
Track One: Smarter Aim, Not a New Missile
On June 24, the Army's Armaments Center announced it had integrated a fire-control capability called "Gunslinger" and adapted it for ground-to-air use, according to an official Army.mil article. The system lets a remote weapon station engage small, moving drone targets automatically — and, notably, while the host vehicle itself is in motion. That's a meaningful detail: a lot of counter-drone gun systems assume a stationary platform, which doesn't hold up for a convoy moving through contested airspace or a maneuver unit trying to keep pace with the fight while fending off overhead FPV threats.
Gunslinger isn't a new missile or a new gun. It's automated fire control — the software and sensor-fusion layer that tracks a small, fast, erratic target and points a weapon at it accurately enough to hit, without requiring a gunner to do all that math manually under stress. Testing so far has shown encouraging results, and the Army says it plans to keep refining the system against higher vehicle speeds and faster drone targets. The Army's framing positions it as a near-term answer for vehicle-mounted counter-UAS defense, the kind of layer that can use existing ammunition — bullets, essentially — rather than a six-figure interceptor round to knock down a cheap commercial quadcopter or FPV strike drone.
Track Two: A Missile Built to a Price Point
The second track is more ambitious and further out. Breaking Defense reported Aug. 5 that the Army has launched a formal search for a Next Generation Counter-sUAS Missile, or NGCM, with a hard cost ceiling attached to the requirement itself rather than treated as a nice-to-have.
The requirements, per the solicitation as reported: the missile has to defeat Group 2 and Group 3 drones — that's roughly 21 to 1,320 pounds, a range that covers everything from beefed-up commercial quadcopters up through small tactical UAS. Threshold performance calls for engagement beyond 16 kilometers at 6 kilometers altitude; the objective (stretch) requirement pushes that to beyond 25 kilometers at 8 kilometers altitude. Critically, NGCM must integrate with the existing Coyote Launcher with minimal to no modifications rather than requiring a new launcher — a constraint that keeps the program tied to infrastructure the Army has already fielded and paid for.
On price, the Army wants at least 5,000 units at under $150,000 each. That's not a discount off current Coyote pricing — the $150,000 ceiling sits at the high end of what Coyote already costs today, for a missile with substantially longer range and altitude reach. Industry responses are due Aug. 20, 2026, a tight turnaround that suggests the Army wants existing or near-mature designs rather than clean-sheet proposals.
Stars and Stripes reported the Army is targeting field-testing readiness by the end of 2027, with 50 missiles produced by early 2028 — an aggressive schedule for a weapon that has to hit a range, altitude, and unit-cost target simultaneously.
The Coyote Backbone
Both tracks lean on Coyote. According to manufacturer RTX, the broader system that integrates Coyote — LIDS, the Low, Slow, Small UAS Integrated Defeat System — has been operating in CENTCOM since 2020, and the company has repeatedly framed it as the Army's most robust integrated answer to Group 1-3 drones. Per a report from Army Recognition, the Army is now pursuing FY2027 funding for the first-ever long-term Coyote framework deal with RTX, a shift from the program's history of shorter procurement actions. Lt. Gen. Frank Lozano is quoted in the report saying details on the arrangement could be finalized within about 90 days.
The budget trend backs up the urgency: counter-UAS development funding jumped from $140.4 million to $359.2 million in FY2027 budget documents, better than a twofold increase. Separately, RTX demonstrated a Coyote Block 3NK variant in February 2026 — a non-kinetic, recoverable version that can loiter, engage, recover, and redeploy rather than being expended and lost on every engagement, in contrast to the expendable, single-use Block 2 — another angle on the same cost problem.
Why It Matters
Attrition math wins wars, and right now the math is running against whoever has to do the shooting down. Ukraine and Russia have both demonstrated, at scale, that tens of thousands of dollars buys a one-way attack drone capable of forcing a defender to spend a multiple of that — sometimes a large multiple — just to stop it. If that ratio holds at volume, any force facing a drone-saturated battlefield can be economically exhausted long before it runs out of will or personnel.
The Army's two-track approach is a direct response to that arithmetic, attacking it from both ends. Gunslinger is the cheap-shot answer: use fire control smart enough that existing guns and ammunition — already vastly cheaper than any missile — can do more of the killing, saving interceptors for targets that actually require them. NGCM is the expensive-shot answer: if you do need a guided interceptor, make it as close as possible to price parity with what it's shooting down, without giving up the range and altitude reach that makes an interceptor useful in the first place.
Neither program is a complete fix on its own. Gunslinger doesn't reach out to 16-25 kilometers; guns have inherent range and engagement-geometry limits. And even at a $150,000 ceiling, NGCM would still cost three to four times what a Shahed-style drone costs to build, meaning the imbalance shrinks rather than disappears. But a compressed cost ratio, paired with a cheaper first line of defense that doesn't burn missiles on easy targets, changes the sustainability calculus for a drawn-out fight. With industry answers due Aug. 20 and a 2027 field-test target, the next real test of whether this approach works will come fast.
