The Pentagon awarded Anduril Industries a contract worth $250 million to counter drone attacks against U.S. forces with the company’s recoverable Roadrunner interceptor.
Under the deal, which Anduril announced on Tuesday, the Defense Department will buy 500 Roadrunner all-up rounds as well as the firm’s portable Pulsar electronic-warfare capability, which can be integrated with aircraft to jam enemy systems.
“This latest contract award highlights Anduril’s commitment to investing its own research and development to support defense innovation, providing rapid, scalable solutions to safeguard U.S. forces,” the company said in a statement.
An Anduril spokesperson declined to name the firm’s DOD customer due to security concerns, but the company said the contract will serve multiple military services in “priority regions where U.S. forces face significant threats” from drones. Deliveries will begin this year and continue through the end of 2025.
The firm is already on a 10-year, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $1 billion with U.S. Special Operations Command to supply counter-drone hardware and software, but the spokesperson would not confirm whether the new business is part of its SOCOM award.
That deal was announced in January 2022 and later that year, the command awarded Anduril $12.5 million for Roadrunner. SOCOM also requested another $19 million for the technology in its fiscal 2024 budget request.
Anduril unveiled Roadrunner last December after spending two years secretly developing it with internal funding. At the time, CEO Palmer Luckey told reporters that Roadrunner was in low-rate production with an initial U.S. customer for “hundreds of units.” He said the company plans to quickly scale to quantities in the hundreds of thousands.
The use of drones and loitering munitions on the battlefield has expanded in recent years. The department wants to learn from the ingenuity of the Ukrainian military, which has deployed small drones in response to Russia’s onslaught, but it also wants to develop a strong defense against the use of hostile drones by adversaries like Iran and its proxies.
The Pentagon created the Joint Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office to develop a coordinated, long-term response to drone threats in 2019, and in 2023, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks revealed a new DoD initiative called Replicator to field thousands of autonomous systems by next summer.
The department announced last week that Replicator’s next area of focus will be Counter-UAS.
According to Anduril, Roadrunner offers a solution for both sides of the challenge. Chris Brose, the company’s chief of strategy, told reporters last December the system — which can carry a variety of payloads — was built to adapt as DOD’s needs change.
“We’re very hopeful that the government will see in this capability what we see in it, which is a novel solution that is built to be adaptable to where those threats are going in the near future — which, by the way, has been a process that’s been playing out over the past few years, and it’s just going to get worse,” he said.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
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