FPV and Loitering Munitions

FPV and loitering munitions are attack drones. First-person-view (FPV) drones are the cheap quadcopters that do much of the front-line strike work in Ukraine; loitering munitions search a target area, some for an hour or more, before diving on what they find with a warhead. Loitering munitions have moved from emergency and trial purchases towards larger and repeat orders, and Ukraine's FPV contracting has grown to wartime scale.

Ukraine buys at wartime scale and India under emergency powers, while France adds to a 2024 contract and Lithuania takes first deliveries under one from 2022. Launchers are spreading from soldiers' packs to trucks, tanks, armoured vehicles and remotely operated canister sites. Australian and Indian firms pair foreign technology with local industry, and Taiwan is building a domestic supply chain. Makers compete on unit cost and resistance to jamming, and while some designs fly much of the mission autonomously, several let a person abort or authorise the final strike.

As of October 2026, Ukraine's FPV contracting for the year had passed the full 2025 total by 54 per cent, India had inducted its largest batch of indigenous loitering munitions, and four PERCH 2.0 prototypes mounting Switchblade munitions on Abrams tanks were due with the US Army by the end of the month.

Wartime, emergency and follow-on orders

Ukraine sets the volume. Its Defense Procurement Agency contracted about $8 billion of drones in the first half of 2026, double the same period of 2025. FPV orders climbed sharply too: the Defence Ministry said in October 2026 that FPV orders for 2026 exceeded the full 2025 total by 54 per cent, with deliveries up almost fourfold. Most buying runs through the DOT-Chain Defense marketplace, where units select what they need and the agency handles contracts and logistics.

India buys loitering munitions under emergency powers. The Army received 450 Nagastra-1R loitering munitions from Nagpur's Solar Defence and Aerospace in October 2026, its largest indigenous batch, under a Rs 158-crore order placed in June 2025 with emergency authority granted after hostilities with Pakistan. By October 2026 the armed forces had signed emergency contracts worth roughly Rs 30,000 crore since that fighting, Operation Sindoor, largely for drones, counter-drone systems, radars and electronic warfare equipment, after a defence ministry document acknowledged that domestic industry could not supply enough niche drones and loitering munitions during the operation. The Army also ordered 225 FPV drones from Aerodrone Robotics after a competitive evaluation with field trials at altitudes up to 17,500 feet.

European contracts signed in earlier years are turning into deliveries and follow-on orders. KNDS announced in October 2026 that France's DGA procurement agency had exercised an option for more MX-10 Damocles quadcopter munitions from KNDS France and Delair, under a July 2024 contract and less than a year after first deliveries. KNDS said the order would raise production capacity but disclosed no quantity, value or schedule. Lithuania took delivery of its first Switchblade 600s from AeroVironment under a contract of about 45 million euros signed in December 2022.

Launch from vehicles and fixed sites

Launchers are moving off the soldier's back. Rheinmetall fired its FV-014, built to strike armour, artillery and command posts at up to 100 kilometres, from a truck-mounted container in July 2026, both stationary and on the move. General Dynamics Land Systems was due to deliver four PERCH 2.0 prototypes, which put AeroVironment's Switchblade munitions on Abrams tanks and Strykers, to the Army by the end of October 2026. The Army bought them through an existing Abrams support contract, ahead of a formal programme of record.

STARK and Thales Australia signed a memorandum of understanding at Land Forces 2026 to fit Cascade launchers to the Bushmaster Dual Cab, the variant that also carries Thales' RapidStriker counter-drone system, so one vehicle can both strike and defend against drones. UVision showed a remotely operated eight-canister launcher for its Hero-120 at AUSA 2026, in mobile, fixed or containerised form, and pitched it for border defence. Neither announcement named a customer, though the Hero-120 itself sits on a US Army contract with Mistral worth up to $982 million.

Domestic production and foreign partners

Australian firms pair foreign technology with domestic industry. At Land Forces 2026 in Perth, NIOA became AeroVironment's local partner for distributing and supporting the Switchblade family in Australia and New Zealand, and agreed with MBDA to explore building MBDA's jet-powered DELUGE one-way attack drone in Australia. Shield AI agreed with Innovaero to fit its Hivemind autonomy to the Australian-designed OWL-B ahead of flight testing for the Australian Defence Force.

India mixes both routes. SkyStriker is built by a joint venture of Bengaluru's Alpha Design Technologies and Israel's Elbit Systems under an Army contract for 100 units, and an India-assembled round destroyed its target during the Yudh Abhyas 2026 exercise with US forces in September 2026. Solar Defence and Aerospace claims more than 80 per cent indigenous content for Nagastra-1R. Taiwan leans on its own industry: AIDC unveiled the man-portable Raven X at a new drone industrial park beside the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, part of a push to reduce reliance on imported drone components.

Cost, jamming and human control

New designs compete on unit cost. Heaviside, a US-Norwegian startup, says its anti-tank Tyr costs "way under $100,000" per unit, built largely from commercial parts. The US military's LUCAS, a one-way attack drone that began as a target drone mimicking Iran's Shahed-136, costs about $35,000 per platform, CENTCOM says; one that crashed during testing on the Eglin range was hauled from the Gulf of Mexico by a fishing crew in September 2026.

Designs assume a jammed sky. Rheinmetall built the FV-014 for electronically contested environments, and KNDS and Delair list a jam-resistant datalink for Damocles. AeroVironment's Switchblade 600 Block 2 adds jam-resistant GPS and AI-assisted target recognition, Hivemind is built to keep operating when GPS or communications are degraded or denied, and Tyr's range of roughly 40 kilometres is set by the reach of its data link under jamming.

Some designs fly much of the mission autonomously, and several leave a person able to abort, recall or authorise the strike. Elbit specifications have SkyStriker flying autonomously through cruise and a loiter of up to two hours with a 5 kg warhead before locking onto a target, and operators can abort up to two seconds before impact. Nagastra-1R stays aloft for about an hour and can be recalled and recovered by parachute if it finds no target or the mission is aborted. Tyr uses AI targeting features field-tested in Ukraine, but Heaviside says it requires a human to authorise the final engagement.