drone

Beyond the battlefield, the USF is “conducting combat testing of both drones and electronic warfare systems, working closely with manufacturers,” the USF deputy chief noted.

As we pointed out earlier in this story, both sides are rapidly developing new technologies and methods to defeat them. A big focus of the Russian USF is on electronic warfare (EW), where countermeasures often last just weeks or less before they no longer work. 

“If necessary, we modify these or other products, taking into account the rapidly changing situation,” Ishtuganov explained. “The enemy plays with frequencies; we reconfigure our electronic warfare systems. The enemy begins to suppress us with electronic warfare; we switch to other frequencies. And this is an ongoing process, requiring, among other things, technical expertise.”

While procurement is a major effort of the new military branch, Ishtuganov offered no details about the process. It is important to note that Russia is now receiving a good deal of assistance from Beijing, now producing drones completely made up of Chinese components. Overall, Moscow has announced lofty intentions for producing new drones. It has a factory where the goal is to build 6,000 Shahed-type drones per month. Russia also has plans to make a total of 2 million first-person-view (FPV) drones this year.

Equipment is just part of the equation. The USF is also recruiting top military talent, Ishtuganov said.

“The effectiveness of this new branch of the armed forces, which is still in its infancy, is demonstrated by its personnel approach,” he suggested. “The best service members are selected, taking into account their combat achievements, among other things.”

The USF was created at the behest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in December 2024 ordered the Defense Ministry to establish a dedicated branch for drone warfare. While Putin shrugged off concerns about the capabilities of his drone operations, one Russian military observer said a combination of issues had impeded operations. One is how troops are deployed, explained the Forces Group “ZAPAD” | News Telegram channel. The other is how they have been equipped.

“Drone operators should not be sent as assault troops, as some commanders do,” the Telegram channel pointed out. “Otherwise, the whole process loses its meaning. Patching holes is a consequence of problems. And the existence of such problems is a result of careless command actions. There is hope that the (USF) troops will become a kind of ‘shield’ for all successful drone operators.”

Resources have been another big issue.

“In combat conditions, losing a drone is very easy, and if you have a strict limit on the number of drones — you are limited in your capabilities,” Forces Group posited. “It is no secret that drones are currently in short supply almost everywhere. Especially night drones. Especially our equivalents of Baba Yaga.” Baba Yagas, as we have explained in the past, are large industrial quadcopter drones armed with guided munitions.

The only Russian unit immune to this concern is Rubicon, a secretive force of drone operators that helped Russia push back Ukraine’s Kursk invasion.

“There is hope that the UAV Forces are being created, among other things, to solve the supply problem so that each unit can eventually call itself at least a mini-Rubicon,” Forces Group “Zapad” postulated.

Samuel Bendett, a drone expert and researcher with the Center for Naval Analyses think tank concurred with much of the Telegram channel’s hypothesis.

“There are no official standards today for many tactical drone R&D and uses in the Russian military,” he told us. “There are uneven supplies, there are issues with UAV pilots treated as typical infantry used for assaults, uneven supplies of qualified pilots and drones, etc. There is hope from many in the Russian military that USF will solve many of these issues.”

“So this has been one of Palmer’s personal projects that we’ve been working on for quite a while, which is why we’ve stayed on it,” Dr. Shane Arnott, a Senior Vice President at Anduril who is currently the lead for what the company calls Manuever Dominance, told TWZ and other outlets during a press briefing yesterday. “So having the support of the founder goes a long way.”

In terms of its core design, Omen is a twin-rotor aircraft that takes off from and lands in a tail-sitting position, where it stands about 10 feet tall. It features relatively long and slender main wings, mounted toward the rear of the fuselage, together with canard foreplanes on either side of the nose. It also has a twin-boom tail configuration extending from the rear of the nacelles on each wing.

Beyond it being hybrid-electric in nature, Anduril has disclosed few details so far about Omen’s propulsion system.

“Candidly, we hit a wall when it came to propulsion technologies,” Arnott noted when talking about prior flight testing of subscale demonstrators. “So we’ve been working very diligently over the last five years, looking at new technologies, and in particular series hybrid tech, and working with the likes of Archer.”

Archer Aviation is an independent company focused, at least publicly, on the development of crewed hybrid-electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Anduril and Archater announced a partnership in December 2024 to work on a design aimed primarily at meeting the requirements of an unspecified U.S. military program. Arnott said Omen is separate from this effort, but some of the technology is being leveraged, especially when it comes to motors. He also described the core elements of the hybrid-electric technologies used in Omen as “internal Anduril magic.”

“We’ve now flown a propulsion demonstrator, which we’re now going to evolve into a new product with EDGE,” he added.

Anduril has yet to provide any hard dimensional or weight specifications for Omen, but says it is in the Group 3 category. The U.S. military defines Group 3 drones as ones that weigh between 55 and 1,320 pounds, can fly up to altitudes between 3,500 and 18,000 feet, and have top speeds of between 100 and 250 knots.

“It is a heavy Group 3, so we are at the upper end of Group 3,” Arnott said. “As many of you would know, Group 3 tends to be dominated by folks who are at the lower weight category … and it’s been a bit of a race to the bottom, to be honest, in that space.”

Arnott further described Omen’s payload capacity as being “three to five times” what most Group 3 drones currently on the market can carry, which he also said was generally in the 25-to-50-pound range.

Omen’s exact range and other performance characteristics are also unknown. Arnott said range-wise, the drone would be able to fly three to four times as far as typical Group 3 designs on the market now.

“What I will say is it is Indo-Pacific relevant ranges,” he added. “We are specifically designing for that particular customer in mind, … where there’s a lot of water, not too much land, [the] need the ability to self-deploy, etc.”

As is typically the case with members of Anduril’s uncrewed systems portfolios, Omen will make use of the company’s Lattice proprietary artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package. With Lattice, “multiple [Omen] aircraft will coordinate flight paths, share sensor data, and adapt behavior in real time, enabling new missions that bring the capabilities of much larger systems to smaller, more expeditionary units,” according to the company’s press release.

“One of the reasons why people keep chasing this particular capability is there’s the promise of being truly runway independent and expeditionary in your capability,” Arnott explained. “So, as we know, in the future fight, and also in disaster response, there’s not going to be a lot of runways available. So, being able to take off and recover anywhere, but still have the performance of an aircraft, is very desirable.”

Arnott said that Omen is also designed to have a “low logistics” footprint to further enable its use during expeditionary and distributed operations from far-flung operating locations. “Its lightweight, foldable frame will allow a two-person team to transport, assemble, and
launch the aircraft in minutes without specialized infrastructure,” Anduril’s press release adds.

Arnott made clear that Anduril sees Omen’s particular combination of features and capabilities, together with its underlying highly modular open-architecture design, as giving it outsized potential compared to even significantly larger crewed aircraft.

“So we can start doing things that would normally take a Group 5 [drone] or potentially a small business jet, because we can carry multiple sensors, be it SAR [synthetic aperture radar], EO [electro-optical, various electronic sensors,” he said. “So we can go after missions like maritime patrol, etc.”

Group 5 is the highest tier the U.S. military has for drones, covering designs with maximum takeoff weights over 1,320 pounds and typical operating altitudes above 18,000 feet, and that can fly at any speed. The parameters for Group 4 are identical, except when it comes to operating altitude, which is set at no more than 18,000 feet.

Multi-payload capability, which is not found on drones at the lower end of the Group 3 category, “makes for a very interesting set of missions,” according to Arnott. “When you’ve got multi-sensors to do correlation, etc, using technologies like Lattice. We can then specifically get into things that would normally be small business jets, be it special mission aircraft, be it maritime patrol. So we’re really looking after, going after that particular space.

Beyond various types of sensors, potential payloads might also include munitions. Anduril’s press release mentions other military mission sets ranging from “logistics resupply to air defense sensing and communications relay,” as well as non-military ones, particularly in the context of a disaster relief scenario.

“So, similar to the problem that we see in the future fight, where runways are likely to be cut or denied, similar kind of problems exist when you have a disaster, whether it’s a tsunami, or a cyclone, or wildfire, or anything like that,” Arnott explained. “Your normal infrastructure tends to be lost as a result of this.”

Omen could help with search and rescue or the delivery of aid, as well act “as a cell phone tower that can fly. So Omen, being a series hybrid, actually has a lot of excess power, so it’s kind of a technical item that can support electronic payloads that need a lot of power to drive them,” he continued. “You can get that in the air, and people’s mobile phones can still work, communications can be restored, and therefore, response can be coordinated. So we are actually very optimistic for capabilities like that for this system.”

It is worth noting here that this vignette speaks to the potential value of Omen as a signal relay node in a military context, as well.

“The vehicle system itself is a dual-use system, so there’s nothing inherently military about it,” Arnott added, highlighting how that will help with sales to non-military customers. It is “the missionization of it will be subject to the standard export controls of the United States government and also the UAE.”

Omen design is also intended to allow military or non-military personnel to readily “snap in, snap off various payloads,” even under field conditions, according to Arnott.

More broadly speaking, “we have very specifically gone at the upper edge of Group 3 … where we believe that there’s a bit of a blank spot in the market,” he said. At the same time, “we believe we’re onto something, and we believe this is less about disrupting Group 3. This is more about disrupting current maritime patrol, special mission aircraft, much bigger systems. That’s what we’re going after here.”

On top of that, “there’s a lot of wreckage on the road to the creation of tail sitters,” Arnott asserted. “A lot of people have had a shot at doing that. Not a ton of people have succeeded in doing it.”

There is at least one successful tail-sitting vertical takeoff and landing drone on the market now, Shield AI’s V-BAT. The V-BAT, which is now combat-proven thanks to its service in Ukraine, is also a Group 3 design.

What sets Omen apart is “really the propulsion tech. So, being able to get it off the ground and then still be able to get into a regime that is efficient for forward flight has been the problem,” according to Arnott. “Typically, you’ll have to pick where your engine is happy from an energy output standpoint. So, helicopters optimize for that vertical flight, which is kind of why they’re horrible at forward flight or very limited in their capability.”

“So having that magical kind of in between [capability], and the hybrid-electric kind of helps there,” he continued. “So you’ve got the ability of having the traditional power plant, as well as then the electric, the battery system, to deal with the lift part of it, and to then get you into cruise.”

“You are seeing others get into this space and start working it. You know, one way to solve it is kind of like what the Shield [AI] guys have done with X-BAT, or they’re planning to do with it, which is a ridiculous amount of thrust, we’ll see there, with the F-15/F-16 engines,” he also noted. “In the Group 3 category, it’s much more tricky [sic] to kind of get that balance right, which is kind of why we’ve been chasing this for better part of five, five to six years.”

X-BAT, which is a much larger design overall and intended for very different mission sets, is not without risks. Shield AI has significant hurdles to clear to make that drone a reality, something it has itself acknowledged. At the same time, Anduril has also laid out extremely ambitious goals for Omen and the market space that it expects the drone to be a contender in.

Sikorsky also recently unveiled a new family of tail-sitting twin-rotor vertical takeoff and landing drones called Nomad, the smallest of which is also in the Group 3 category, as seen in the composite rendering below. The tactical vertical takeoff and landing drone space is heating up, in general, with a growing number of tilt-rotors and other types of designs, as well.

“This is an architecture that we’ve been we’ve been working on for some time. I won’t say that we’re announcing a family, but it’s certainly a it is a scalable architecture,” Arnott said in response to a direct question from this author about whether there might be plans already for further scaled-up derivatives of Omen. “Today we’re we’re announcing this one configuration.”

In Anduril’s case, Arnott pointed to the order from the UAE-based customer as evidence that Omen “isn’t just another prototype, as the vast majority of the industry has done in this particular class. We will actually create a full production system, we will actually take this into service, and we’ll be fully missionized.”

That being said, Anduril has not disclosed a firm timeline for the first flight of a production representative Omen or a projected unit price. The company has described the current joint development effort with EDGE as being on a three-year timeline that extends into 2028, after which series production of fully missionized examples is expected to begin.

“When it’s ready, it’ll be ready,” according to Arnott.

Anduril’s press notes that the company has already invested $850 million in relevant “mission autonomy technology and Group 3 VTOL development,” and that EDGE is now providing another $200 million to continue work on the drone. EDGE has already been investing heavily in its own expanding portfolio of uncrewed aircraft designs. The company is also involved in the development and production of a wide range of other weapon systems, as well as other defense and security products.

The EDGE-Anduril Production Alliance is also expected to extend well beyond Omen to cooperation on other systems. The joint venture also notably represents Anduril’s first true joint venture outside of the United States. The company has a presence in the United Kingdom and Australia, but those are wholly-owned subsidiaries. Anduril is separately building a 50,000-square-foot engineering center in the UAE that it will manage by itself.

Beyond the order from the customer in the UAE, “there has [sic] been U.S. government customers tracking [Omen] … certainly there have been a number of close customers that we’ve kept in the loop,” Arnott noted. “We tend to keep it reasonably tight when we’re doing development, and then go more broadly once we’re confident and have conviction that we have [the] line of sight to a product that we do now.”

Anduril has already promised more information about Omen to come at the Dubai Airshow next week, and we will follow up when we learn more.

Contact the author: [email protected]

As TWZ has noted in the past, the maritime platforms that Jiangsu Dayang Marine has produced could potentially have roles in an actual operational context, including when paired with larger crewed warships. At the same time, the relatively small size and general configuration of the ‘mini drone carrier’ would limit its suitability for any kind of sustained employment in support of real-world operations.

Even without a secondary operational role, dedicated naval drone test and training platforms still offer value to the PLA, which has been steadily working to expand the scale and scope of its shipboard uncrewed aviation capabilities. AR-500CJ, which AVIC has said could be used as a surveillance asset or an aerial signal relay node, among other roles, is part of this evolving ecosystem. Another drone helicopter intended for shipboard operations, based on the larger AR-2000 design from China National Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation (CATIC), was among a host of new uncrewed aircraft designs showcased at a huge military parade in Beijing in September.

Chinese naval drone developments extend well beyond vertical takeoff and landing capable designs. Work on a navalized version of the stealthy flying-wing GJ-11 Sharp Sword uncrewed combat air vehicle (UCAV) has become a particular centerpiece of these efforts. Imagery just recently emerged that offered the first clear look at one of those drones with its arrestor hook deployed. The naval GJ-11, also sometimes referred to as the GJ-21, is expected to fly from at least some of China’s growing fleet of aircraft carriers and big-deck amphibious assault ships.

On a broader level, China continues to reinforce its position as a global leader in uncrewed aviation developments in the military and commercial domains, and there is often considerable overlap between the two. Just this year, TWZ was the first to report on the emergence of several previously unseen advanced drone designs, a number of which are also notably large. As we have reported in the past, flying-wing uncrewed aircraft designs also continue to be a particular area of focus for the Chinese aviation industry.

With all this in mind, China’s use of bespoke ships with open flight decks to support drone testing and training, as well as other purposes, only looks likely to grow.

Contact the author: [email protected]

Last year, the Air Force announced that it trimmed back the field of prospective Increment 1 CCA designs to the proposals from Anduril and General Atomics. However, Fury’s story traces back to the late 2010s and an aggressor drone concept from a company called Blue Force Technologies, which Anduril acquired in 2023, as you can read about in extensive detail in this past War Zone feature.

“This marks another major milestone for the CCA program, now with two new uncrewed fighter aircraft going from concept to flight in less than 2 years,” the Air Force has now said in a press release confirming the YFQ-44A’s first flight. “This flight testing expands the program’s knowledge base on flight performance, autonomous behaviors, and mission system integration. By advancing multiple designs in parallel, the Air Force is gaining broader insights and refining how uncrewed aircraft will complement crewed fifth-and sixth-generation platforms in future mission environments.”

“This milestone demonstrates how competition drives innovation and accelerates delivery,” Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said in a statement. “These flights are giving us the hard data we need to shape requirements, reduce risk, and ensure the CCA program delivers combat capability on a pace and scale that keeps us ahead of the threat.”

Anduril and the Air Force had previously declined to provide a hard timeline for when the YFQ-44A would make its first flight.

“We have multiple vehicles at our test facility in ground testing right now, and we’re in the final stages before first flight,” Diem Salmon, Anduril’s Vice President of Air Dominance and Strike, had told TWZ and others at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2025 Air, Space, and Cyber Conference back in September. “All in all, we’re still well ahead of the program schedule in terms of getting YFQ-44A into the air. [We] feel really confident in our ability to do so and still feel really good about the program schedule.”

At that time, Salmon, as well as Jason Levin, Anduril’s Senior Vice President of Engineering for Air Dominance and Strike, offered additional details about the plans for Fury’s first flight, including the level of autonomy the company was hoping to demonstrate, which was a key schedule driver. You can read more about that here.

“It was not a race to get to first flight as fast as humanly possible. It was, how do we field this really advanced and novel capability as fast as we can,” Salmon had said. “And with that comes the recognition that the autonomy is the hard part here, and so that’s the thing that you actually need to burn down from a technical development, testing, and risk perspective. And so that’s how we’ve approached our program.”

Secretary of the Air Force Meink had also told TWZ and others at a separate roundtable at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference that his service was hoping to see the YFQ-44A fly by the middle of October. In a keynote address at the event, now-retired Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin described Fury’s first flight as “imminent,” as well.

“My engineers tell me that if we push the button … [the drone] will take off, it’ll fly around, and it’ll come back home,” Anduril founder Palmer Luckey had also told reporters earlier this month, according to Breaking Defense. “The Air Force is going through a process of evaluation that is very, very reasonable, I think.”

“Obviously, now the problem is we’re into the shutdown,” Luckey added at that time. “Certainly … a lot of stuff stops moving.”

The U.S. federal government remains in a shutdown. Efforts have been made to find continued funding for various priority efforts, especially within the U.S. military.

With the YFQ-42A and the YFQ-44A now flying, “developmental flight activities continue across both vendor and government test locations, including Edwards Air Force Base [AFB], where envelope expansion and integration work will inform future experimentation,” according to the Air Force’s press release today. “The Air Force’s Experimental Operations Unit (EOU), located at Nellis AFB, will be instrumental in evaluating operational concepts as the program transitions from testing to fielding substantial operational capability for Increment 1 before the end of the decade.”

How many Increment 1 CCAs the Air Force ultimately plans to acquire is not entirely clear. Air Force officials have said previously that between 100 and 150 drones could be ordered under the program’s first phase. It also remains to be seen whether the service buys YFQ-42As, YFQ-44As, or a mix of both.

“CCA is part of the Next Generation Air Dominance Family of Systems and leverages the Department’s Government Reference Architectures—enabling platform-agnostic autonomy development, streamlined integration across vendor systems, and more agile capability updates over time,” the Air Force’s release also noted. “The architecture is built to integrate with Allied and Joint partners, offering common autonomy and mission system standards that support seamless interoperability and teaming across Services and coalition forces.”

There are still plans for at least one more incremental CCA developmental cycle, the requirements for which have yet to be publicly disclosed. However, the submissions for Increment 2 are already expected to be significantly different from the ones for Increment 1. in September, Lockheed Martin unveiled a new CCA-type drone, called Vectis, which the company suggested could be proposed for Increment 2. This week, Aviation Week also disclosed the existence of a new drone design from Northrop Grumman subsidiary Scaled Composites, currently referred to just as Project Lotus, which that outlet described in terms of its similarities to Vectis.

Increment 2 has also long been expected to involve foreign participation. Earlier this month, authorities in the Netherlands notably announced they had signed the letter of intent about joining the CCA program.

The Air Force’s CCA effort is also directly intertwined with similar efforts underway within the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy. The Air Force still has many general questions to answer about how its future CCA fleets, whatever they are comprised of, will be deployed, launched, recovered, supported, and otherwise operated, not to mention employed tactically.

As such, in addition to being an important milestone in Fury’s development, the YFQ-44A’s first flight is also another step forward for the Air Force’s larger CCA plans.

Update, 3:45 PM EST:

Anduril has now put out its own release regarding the YFQ-44A’s first flight.

“Flight testing is where we prove to ourselves, to the Air Force, to our allies, and to our adversaries that these proclamations about game-changing technology go beyond words. They’re real, and they are taking to the skies today,” Jason Levin, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Air Dominance and Strike at Anduril, writes. “The flight testing process is where we prove that our aircraft meets the mark in terms of speed, maneuverability, autonomy, stealth, range, weapons systems integration, and more. As YFQ-44A climbs higher, we’re proving that it doesn’t merely look like a fighter, but that it performs like one.”

“Flight testing for the CCA program is also about more than simply proving raw fighter performance in a vacuum. The real step change that autonomy is driving is enabling a team of robotic aircraft to collaborate to accomplish mission objectives,” he adds. We designed YFQ-44A for a specific Air Force mission: to enhance survivability, lethality, and mission effectiveness by teaming with crewed fighter aircraft or operating independently. Through flight testing, Anduril and the Air Force are developing those collaborative, manned-unmanned teaming concepts and tactics that will inform how we integrate, fight with, and sustain truly autonomous aircraft.”

Levin also speaks more directly to Anduril’s previously stated focus on autonomy for the first flight, and now for testing going forward.

“YFQ-44A was not designed to be a remotely-piloted aircraft, and that is not how we are operating it — from first flight and forever onward. All of our taxi and flight tests have been and will continue to be semi-autonomous. This is a new age of air power; there is no operator with a stick and throttle flying the aircraft behind the scenes,” he says in the release. “Our aircraft is ushering in this new paradigm with incredible technical precision: it executes a mission plan on its own, manages flight control and throttle adjustment independent of human command, and returns to land at the push of a button, all under the watchful eye of an operator “on the loop” but not in it.”

“It must do more than just fly. CCA are built to win the high end fight; that’s what we’ve built the software that powers YFQ-44A to do. In the air, the fully integrated weapon system processes data at the speed that combat demands. It identifies targets and commands effects, enhancing the lethality, survivability, and effectiveness of the combined team,” he continues. “On the ground, YFQ-44A’s software backbone tracks and manages maintenance, vehicle health, and more, streamlining sustainment to ensure that it’s always ready to fly. In short, YFQ-44A’s autonomy is what makes it more than just a flying machine, but one that’s ready to fight.”

Anduril’s release also includes details about the production plans for the YFQ-44A, which tie into a “hyperscale” production facility, called Arsenal-1, that the company is now building in Ohio.

“To achieve the scale we need at the speed that the threat demands, we are building and testing a new type of production system for YFQ-44A. Through the employment of a common software backbone called ArsenalOS, our production system multiplies the effects of the thousands of design-for-manufacturing decisions made during the development of YFQ-44A,” according to Levin. “That system is underpinned by a manufacturing philosophy focused on simple, mature, and low-risk production technologies, rather than relying on manufacturing miracles. YFQ-44A will be produced at rate by a broad labor pool, commoditized supply chain, and industry-standard manufacturing processes.”

“YFQ-44A is streaking through the skies, but its next chapter will be written on the factory floors of America’s heartland. Our investment in this aircraft is the driving force behind Arsenal-1, the 5 million square foot production facility that we’re building in Columbus, Ohio,” he adds. “YFQ-44A will be the first program to move into the factory when its doors open, and we are on track to begin production of prototype CCA at Arsenal-1 in the first half of 2026.”