The U.S. Marine Corps is putting a new kind of shooter into the counter-drone fight: a stripped-down off-road buggy carrying twin Hellfire missiles and a battlefield radar, built to kill a drone and then disappear before anyone can shoot back. Reporting that broke this week confirms the Corps has begun fielding V2X's Tempest mobile counter-UAS vehicle under a $19 million contract for ten systems.

The contract, awarded August 11, 2026, calls for V2X to deliver ten Tempest vehicles with a completion date of August 2027, according to Army Recognition. The order also covers training, spare parts, software management and engineering support — the full logistics tail needed to keep a small fleet of missile-armed buggies running in the field rather than just handing units a vehicle and walking away.

What Tempest Actually Is

Strip away the missiles and Tempest starts life as a Can-Am Maverick X3, a commercially available 4x4 off-road buggy more commonly seen tearing through desert trails than hunting drones. V2X has bolted onto that platform two AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire missiles and a RADA RPS-42 multi-mission radar, turning a recreational vehicle chassis into a mobile air-defense node aimed squarely at Class 2 and Class 3 unmanned aircraft — the mid-size to larger drone categories that sit above small quadcopters but below full-size aircraft.

The missiles give Tempest real reach: Army Recognition puts the engagement envelope at roughly 0.5 to 8 kilometers, a range that lets the buggy engage drones well before they close on a protected position. The Defense Post's coverage of the order adds that the system is built largely from commercially available components and is designed to operate in adverse weather — details that matter for a vehicle meant to deploy fast and operate in conditions that would ground more delicate systems.

Shoot-and-Scoot, Not Shoot-and-Sit

The tactical concept behind Tempest is spelled out most directly by The Defense Post: the vehicle's small footprint and off-road mobility let it fire on a drone target and then rapidly reposition before an adversary can locate and target the launch point in return, leaving the area during the missile's flyout to cut the time its crew stays exposed to follow-on drones or counterfire. Military.com's report on the original contract award frames the buggies in nearly identical terms, describing them as "built to fire and vanish" — designed to engage a drone with a Hellfire and then relocate before any counterattack can be organized against the crew.

That mobility is the whole point of putting a Hellfire on a dune buggy instead of a fixed launcher. A stationary counter-drone position is a known, static target the moment it fires; a buggy that can peel off across open terrain immediately after a shot forces an adversary to reacquire a moving target rather than simply return fire on a known grid coordinate.

V2X President and CEO Jeremy C. Wensinger tied the program to a broader shift in aerial threats, telling The Defense Post: "Unmanned aerial systems are fundamentally changing the modern battlefield." The company has also built a trailer-mounted variant of the same missile-and-radar package intended for fixed-site protection — guarding airfields and ammunition depots — rather than the mobile buggy's roving role. Tempest itself was first shown publicly at the AUSA exposition in October 2025, according to The Defense Post, meaning this Marine Corps order marks the system's transition from trade-show hardware to a fielded, funded program of record.

Where It Fits

Military.com's report situates Tempest within a wider Marine Corps counter-UAS buildout, noting the buggy joins systems already in the service's inventory — including the missile-and-cannon-armed MADIS, the machine-gun-equipped L-MADIS, and high-power microwave systems — rather than replacing them. That framing matters: Tempest isn't being pitched as a single solution to the drone problem but as one more tool — a kinetic, mobile, missile-armed option — layered alongside the counter-drone systems the Corps already operates.

The Defense Post and Military.com both report that further orders beyond the initial ten vehicles depend on how the systems perform and how operational requirements evolve, meaning this contract is a starting point rather than a guaranteed larger buy. Whether Tempest scales beyond this first batch will likely depend on how the vehicles perform once fielded units start using them against real Class 2 and 3 drone threats.

Why It Matters

Class 2 and 3 drones — the mid-size systems too large for a shotgun or a simple jammer to reliably handle, but not so large they warrant a dedicated air-defense missile battery — have become one of the harder gaps in counter-UAS coverage. Tempest is a direct answer to that gap: it pairs a proven missile, the Longbow Hellfire, with a radar built for exactly this mission and mounts both on a platform cheap and mobile enough to disperse across a battlefield rather than concentrate at one fixed site.

The shoot-and-scoot doctrine built into Tempest also reflects a broader lesson the Marine Corps and other services have drawn from recent conflicts: any system that fires a detectable weapon becomes a target the instant it fires. Building mobility directly into a counter-drone platform, rather than treating it as an afterthought, is a survivability decision as much as a tactical one. A $19 million, ten-vehicle order is a modest first step, but it puts a genuinely new class of counter-drone weapon — a missile-armed, expendable-feeling buggy — into Marine hands for real-world evaluation.

Sources