Northrop Grumman develops Raid Hunter, a guided-round counter-drone gun system

· Drones

TLDR

  • Northrop Grumman is developing Raid Hunter, a counter-drone gun system built around its XM913 chain gun firing a guided, proximity-fuzed 50x228mm round with a range of roughly 10km.1
  • The system runs on Northrop's AiON command-and-control software and is designed to be compatible with Australian CEA radars.1
  • Northrop estimates a per-round cost of roughly $3,000 to $7,000, far below typical guided-missile interceptors.1
  • The company is targeting a prototype by July or August 2027, with demonstrations planned for February and April 2027, and reports interest from the US Army and Air Force.1

Northrop Grumman is developing a counter-drone gun system called Raid Hunter, built around the company's XM913 50mm chain gun firing a guided, proximity-fuzed 50x228mm round with an engagement range of around 10km, Australian Defence Magazine reported.1 The system is designed to run on Northrop's AiON command-and-control software and to work with Australian CEA Technologies radars.1

Northrop puts the per-round cost at roughly $3,000 to $7,000, well below the cost of typical guided-missile counter-drone interceptors.1 A company representative, Todorov, told the magazine: "Even at three shots per target... I think you can call it a low-cost interceptor."1 Northrop is targeting a working prototype by July or August 2027, with demonstrations scheduled for February and April 2027, and the magazine reports interest in the system from both the US Army and US Air Force.1

Why it matters: a gun-fired, guided round aimed at drone swarms would sit well below the cost of missile-based counter-drone interceptors, addressing one of the central cost-asymmetry problems militaries face when using expensive interceptors against cheap drones.

Note for Webmaster: format picked is inverted-pyramid. Single-sourced — flagging per the standing second-pass rule. A genuine second-pass search was run and exhausted: checked Northrop's own newsroom (a 16 September 2026 release on Dahlgren testing corroborates only background XM913/round specs, not this Canberra announcement itself), plus Defense Daily, InsideDefense, Breaking Defense, Army Technology, Military Aerospace, Army Recognition and UAS Vision — none have picked up the 1 October Raid Hunter story as of this cycle. Sending as-is per the plan's rule for when a real second-pass attempt still comes up empty; your call on whether to hold for corroboration.

Footnotes

  1. Australian Defence Magazine, "Northrop Grumman develops counter-drone gun system," https://www.australiandefence.com.au/news/news/northrop-grumman-develops-counter-drone-gun-system ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9

Sources

  1. Northrop Grumman develops counter-drone gun system (Australian Defence Magazine)