The Marines have a bunch o’ Bolts heading their way.
On Thursday, defense tech poster child Anduril announced that the US Marine Corps placed a $24M order for 600 of the company’s Bolt-M kamikaze drones under the Organic Precision Fires-Light (OPF-L) program, with deliveries expected between 2026 and 2027.
Bolt goes boom: Weighing around 15 pounds with a 12.5-mile range and 40 minutes of endurance, the Bolt-M is the munition variant of Anduril’s small, backpack-packable Bolt quadcopter drone.
- Anduril was first selected for the Marine Corps’ $249M OPF-L program—alongside Teledyne FLIR and AV—back in April 2024, and kicked off testing of the Bolt-M with the Corps later that year.
- Under the initial phase of the OPF-L program, Anduril was awarded $6.5M and delivered more than 250 Bolt-Ms, which were tested over 13 months. Teledyne FLIR and AV got $12M and $9M, respectively, in the first tranche of funding.
- The company has the capacity to produce 100 Bolts-Ms per month and aims to ramp up to 175 this year.
- Teledyne FLIR, meanwhile, was recently awarded $42.5M for a second batch of Rogue 1 strike drones under the OPF-L program and is also delivering 600 of ‘em to the Corps.
According to Anduril’s announcement, the first Marine Corps field units will get their hands on the Bolts starting this summer, where “end users will train and employ organic, loitering, precision strike capabilities in tactical formations.”
Also snuck into Anduril’s announcement, the company disclosed that they recently delivered more than 300 Bolt systems to “another customer within just five months of contract award,” but Anduril declined to comment on who that mystery buyer is.
With some basic back-of-the-napkin math, the Bolt-Ms are a little bit on the pricey side for a one-way attack drone, coming in at around $26,000 per unit in the first delivery and nearly $40,000 in the second, but the Marines seem to have taken a fancy to them and Anduril told Tectonic that they’ve “made a bunch of improvements to the design to make Bolt more producible” during the testing stage.
Anduril declined to confirm unit costs, stating that “typical Bolt configurations cost on the order of tens of thousands of dollars,” but if this next phase of the OPF-L program goes according to plan, everyone’s favorite defense tech darling could be due for an even bigger payday.
This story was updated to include comment from Anduril