Death, taxes, and the primes hopping on the drone hype train. On Friday, L3Harris Technologies announced a “new Counter-Unmanned Systems (C-UxS) initiative” to “overcome unmanned threats across the air, land and sea domains.” Welcome to the club.
The company said the “new effort provides expanded and customized C-UxS offerings by combining existing solutions with other key battlefield technologies.” Those offerings include:
- VAMPIRE: The Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) is mounted on truckbeds to fire APKWS laser-guided Hydra-70 rockets at aerial threats.
- CORVUS-RAVEN: Their counter-small UAS kit that provides passive signal detection, situational awareness, and defeat/jamming capabilities.
- Nimble Finch: An electronic countermeasures (ECM) c-UAS jammer with an updatable waveform library.
- Drone Guardian: Fixed-site C2 and sensor fusion (radar/RF/EO) with sensor and effector-agnostic integrations for bases and fixed infrastructure.
“Delivering effective C-UxS solutions is a mission-first priority at L3Harris,” Jon Rambeau, President of Integrated Mission Systems at L3Harris, said in a statement. “Traditional solutions that take years to produce are not a viable option when UAV software is maturing by the minute and hardware is changing by the hour.”
However, none of this tech is new, and this initiative kind of seems like more of a reaction to some of the Pentagon’s recent c-UAS moves, especially the Army-led counter-drone task force, formally the Joint Inter-Agency Task Force 401 (JIATF). The effort was announced last week to “bring together our best talent from all our agencies to counter these threats and restore control of our skies.”
Dolla dolla bill: Needless to say, the DoD is putting its money where its mouth is on the c-UAS front:
- The FY2026 budget sets aside $3.1B across the services to c-UAS, a 13.4 percent increase over last year’s budget.
- The One Big Beautiful Bill allocated $500M to countering drones.
- The Air Force is looking to secure $836M next year for mobile air base defense systems to counter drones, a fivefold funding increase, according to a statement released last week.
L3Harris is betting that consolidating its c-UAS offerings under one fancy new umbrella will help it compete with the many startups in the space for these drone defense dollars with existing technology. The VAMPIRE system has been deployed in Ukraine for a number of years, and they snagged a new contract in June to provide more of them to the Pentagon, building on a $40M contract in 2023.
Big boys: They’re not the only prime taking a missile-focused approach to c-UAS this week. On Monday, Swedish prime Saab announced a new “high-precision, short-range mini-missile” called Nimbrix that is “both agile and relatively affordable to produce.” They’ll showcase Nimbrix at DSEI in London next week.
Whether the primes can compete with the new entrants on the cost-per-effect front will be a big question for the Pentagon’s procurement people. L3Harris’s VAMPIRE APKWS rockets cost $35,000 a pop, and Saab’s Nimbrix is vaguely described as “relatively affordable.”
Startups like Epirus (high-power microwaves that fry drones), Allen Control Systems (automated machine gun that shoots them down), Anduril (EW, missiles, and interceptor drones), and D-Fend Solutions (RF-takeover tech that commandeers drones) all have different approaches to downing drones, but the primes are betting that kinetic takedowns are still in fashion.