On June 24, 2026, Lithuanian drone developer Granta Autonomy announced the Black Wasp, a small autonomous interceptor designed around a single, blunt purpose: catch a strike drone in the air and destroy it. The company is explicit about the target set. The Black Wasp is built to counter strike drones, reconnaissance UAS, and loitering munitions — and it names the Iranian-origin Shahed-class drone, the cheap one-way attack drone that has defined the European air-defense problem, as the threat it is meant to kill.
At 4 kg, the Black Wasp is closer to a guided munition than a conventional quadcopter. It cruises at 160 km/h and tops out at 320 km/h, the kind of closing speed needed to run down a propeller-driven Shahed rather than wait for one to fly past a fixed gun line. Granta quotes a reach of 20 km on a one-way intercept, or 40 km if the drone is recovered and flown home. Its ceiling is 7,000 m above mean sea level, and endurance reflects the tradeoff between speed and time aloft: roughly 15 minutes at cruise, dropping to six-plus minutes when the interceptor is pushed to maximum velocity. Those are sprint numbers, not patrol numbers — the Black Wasp is meant to be launched at a track, not loitered indefinitely.
How It Finds Its Target
The headline capability is in the guidance stack. Granta says the Black Wasp uses AI/ML navigation that is resilient to GPS and GNSS jamming — a direct answer to the electronic-warfare-saturated environment where Shaheds and other strike drones now operate, and where reliance on satellite positioning is a liability rather than an asset. For the terminal phase, the interceptor switches to onboard computer vision that identifies, tracks, and locks onto high-speed aerial targets, steering the drone into the final intercept without a human pilot threading the needle by hand.
That terminal-guidance approach matters because hitting a small, fast-moving drone in three dimensions is genuinely hard. A human operator looking at a video feed struggles to judge closure rate and lead angle against a target that may be only a meter or two across. Pushing identification and lock-on onto the airframe itself — and making it robust to jamming — is the engineering problem the Black Wasp is built to solve.
Crucially, the interceptor does not have to find its quarry from scratch. According to corroborating coverage, the Black Wasp integrates with standard NATO air-defense radar networks, drawing real-time 3D telemetry and target updates from existing sensors. In practice that means a ground radar detects an inbound drone, hands a cued track to the Black Wasp, and the interceptor flies out under radar direction until its own vision system can take over for the kill. It is a layered handoff: long-range radar for detection and cueing, onboard AI for the endgame.
Part of a Triad, Not a Standalone
Granta is positioning the Black Wasp as one leg of a three-part system rather than a point product. It is designed to operate alongside the company's Hornet XR, a reconnaissance drone that acts as the sensor, and the X-Wing, a loitering munition that serves as the strike element. Together the three form what Granta frames as a sensor-to-shooter ecosystem — a self-contained kill chain for layered drone defense.
The logic of that triad is worth unpacking. The Hornet XR provides eyes; the Black Wasp provides the fast, reusable interceptor for catching airborne threats; and the X-Wing provides a loitering strike capability for targets on the ground or other use cases. Pitching the interceptor as part of an ecosystem, rather than a single drone, signals that Granta is trying to sell an integrated air-defense layer to military buyers rather than a one-off gadget — and it lets each element specialize instead of forcing one airframe to do everything.
The Cost-Exchange Problem It Targets
The reason a 4 kg interceptor is news at all comes down to economics, and that is where U.S. government analysis provides the authoritative frame. The Congressional Research Service, in its report on Department of Defense counter-UAS efforts, lays out the core dilemma: cheap one-way attack drones in the Shahed class can be intercepted only at great expense when the defender reaches for traditional, high-end effectors. Shooting down a cheap attack drone with an expensive surface-to-air missile is a trade the attacker is happy to make every time. The CRS report frames low-cost kinetic interceptors and layered defenses as a priority precisely because of this cost-exchange challenge, for the United States and its allies.
That is the gap the Black Wasp is aiming at. A small, mass-producible interceptor that can be cued by radar already in the field and flown autonomously into its target is, at least in concept, the kind of low-cost kinetic effector the CRS analysis describes. Granta has not published a unit price, so the cost-kill math against a Shahed remains unproven in public — but the design intent is unmistakable. Build the interceptor cheap enough, and the economics that currently favor the attacker start to flip.
Why It Matters
The Black Wasp is a fresh data point in a drone-on-drone interceptor race that is reshaping air defense along Europe's eastern flank. The Shahed-class drone and its derivatives have forced a doctrinal rethink: defenders cannot afford to meet swarms of cheap attack drones with scarce, expensive missiles, and the CRS has flagged that imbalance as a top-tier problem for the U.S. and its allies. Interceptors built specifically to counter strike drones at a fraction of missile cost are the most direct answer on offer.
What distinguishes Granta's entry is the combination of attributes in one small airframe: sprint speed fast enough to chase a Shahed, jamming-resilient AI navigation that does not fold when GNSS is denied, onboard computer vision for terminal lock-on, and plug-in compatibility with the NATO radar networks defenders already operate. That last point lowers the barrier to fielding — a buyer does not have to rebuild a sensor architecture to use it. And by selling the interceptor as part of a Hornet XR / Black Wasp / X-Wing triad, Granta is making a bet that the future of counter-UAS is integrated kill chains, not isolated gadgets.
The open questions are the ones every interceptor program faces: unit cost at scale, hit probability against real Shahed profiles under electronic attack, and how quickly a small Lithuanian developer can produce enough of them to matter. Granta has answered none of those publicly yet. But the announcement is a marker of where the eastern-flank air-defense conversation is heading — toward cheap, autonomous, radar-cued interceptors purpose-built to make the attacker's cost math stop working.
