The Marines' New Kamikaze Drone Will Take to the Skies With a Twist (2024)

On May 7, defense company Teledyne FLIR unveiled a new quadcopter drone aircraft called “Rogue 1” at a defense exposition in Tampa. Like the protagonists in the 2016 Star Wars film of the same name, Rogue 1 is designed to perform one-way—i.e. suicidal—attack missions.

This kind of drone is popularly dubbed a kamikaze, or suicide, drone. The defense industry prefers the term “loitering munition,” referring to the drone’s ability to spend time loitering over the battlefield at low speeds, giving the operator time to locate a target using the drone’s sensors.

But in a twist, Rogue 1 doesn't sacrifice itself pointlessly in the event no suitable targets are found. Its designers have taken pains to ensure it's capable of safely returning to base to fight another day.

Currently, both Russian and Ukrainian forces are expending tens of thousands of FPV drones, a very cheap kind of loitering munition, every month against targets ranging from individual soldiers to main battle tanks. And larger, medium, or long-range loitering munitions like Russia’s Lancet drone, which cost in the low-to-mid tens of thousands of dollars, are killing self-propelled artillery, jet fighters, and air defense vehicles worth millions or tens of millions.

The U.S. military is nowhere close to operating any loitering munition on the scale seen in Ukraine, though it did operationally employ comparatively fancy Switchblade-300 anti-personnel loitering munition on a limited scale in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2010s.

Teledyne hopes Rogue 1 can help fill the gap. Not only has the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) been secretly testing Rogue 1 since 2022 for its Ground Organic Precision Strike System (GOPSS) program, but now, the Marine Corps’ Systems Command has awarded Teledyne $12 million to deliver 127 Rogue 1s for initial fielding in that service’s Organic Precision Fire-Light program.

While best known for thermal cameras, Teledyne-FLIR has acquired several drone builders and now manufactures the R80D Skyraider drone the U.S. Army seeks to use for chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear reconnaissance, the miniature Black Hornet Nano drone, and the SkyRanger R70 surveillance quadcopter. The latter two types were donated to and used by Ukraine.

Rogue 1 is a quadcopter weighing 10 pounds with four rotors that can be tucked into its elongated fuselage for easy transportation, along with a five-pound Flight Contral Unit. Able to take off vertically, it can attain a maximum speed of 70 miles per hour when dashing, and has an endurance of 30 minutes while loitering at more sustainable speeds.

Rogue 1 is commonly described as having a range of 6.6 miles (10 km), but Teledyne’s drone director Brian Bills told PopMech that’s a conservative figure:

“The 10km figure represents a range where the aircraft can travel to the target set (at 10km), loiter for several minutes, and then return to the launch point. One-way missions can be conducted at much longer ranges [than 10 kilometers].”

From that description, it sure sounds like a Rogue 1 could potentially fly more than twice the 6.6-mile range for a one-way strike against a pre-located target.

Teledyne also states Rogue 1 can navigate under GPS-denied conditions because it can fall back on image-matching navigation using downward-looking optical and thermal sensors. That’s vital, because satellite navigation has been extensively jammed or spoofed (misdirected) in Ukraine’s drone/missile war.

But jamming also can affect a drone’s command link, a method to which many American drones supplied to Ukraine have proven vulnerable. However, Bills told PopMech that Rogue 1’s AES-256 encrypted link had been designed for “survivability against near-peer threats” [i.e. military capabilities of China and Russia] and has provisions to successfully complete the mission in the event that jamming is present.”

The munition’s tablet-style control system doesn’t ordinarily require much manual piloting, and calculates intercepts of stationary or moving targets at an angle designated by the operator. Rogue 1 retains a key feature of loitering munitions in general: the ability to ‘wave off’ (cancel) a planned strike seconds before impact should circ*mstances evolve, such as detection of nearby civilians.

The drone support multiple payloads on a gimble, including a directional (ie. low-collateral damage) anti-personnel fragmentation warhead or an explosively formed penetrator (EPF) for attacks on armored vehicles. According to Bills, all the combat payloads include laser rangefinder or Height-of-Burst sensors allowing operators to designate the ideal air-burst altitude for the target in question, thereby improving precisions and reducing collateral damage.

One-way missions optional

Teledyne has particularly emphasized Rogue 1’s unique mechanical-interrupt defusing system that ensures the drone can be recalled, safely recovered, and reused additional times if an attack is canceled or an operator can’t find a worthwhile target. The status of the fuse is reflected by an external indicator switch.

“This capability is only possible by strict adherence to military standards (such as MIL-STD-1911 & MIL-STD-1316) and other precepts enforced by the safety boards,” Bills wrote to Pop Mech. “To our knowledge, the Rogue 1 is the only loitering munition that fully complies with these standards to enable safe recovery and reuse.”

MIL-STD-1911 pertains to safety criteria for hand-emplaced ordnance, while MIL-STD-1316 establishes safety criteria for fuses. While kamikaze drones prior to Rogue 1 have been described as optionally recoverable (for example the Hero-120 mentioned below), perhaps Teledyne is claiming Rogue 1 is the first to meet these specific standards for recoverable munitions.

Rogue 1 can also mount a non-destructive training round payload, allowing Marines to sustainably practice attacks at low cost. Bills noted the training payload could also work for use of Rogue 1 in a reusable reconnaissance role thanks to the company’s day/night-capable FLIR Boson+ 640 camera integrated into the drone. This is a compact, uncooled long-wave infrared (LWIR) camera capable of 8x zoom currently priced between $4,000 and $6,000, depending on sub-model.

Concerning the ‘limited quantities’ of Rogue 1s procured by SOCOM in 2022 for the smaller Echelon-0 component of GOPSS, Bills says Rogue-1 has entered a “second phase” of GOPSS focused on test and certification process as well as live-fire testing. “Operational testing will come in a subsequent phase,” he says.

Teledyne is presently developing a tube launcher for integration onto vehicles. Besides U.S. military users, Bills says Teledyne has been talking with “multiple interested international parties.”

Rogue 1’s rivals in organic self-destruction

The Marine Corps may spend up to $249 million over up eight years on Organic Precision Fires-Light (OPF-L), a program aimed to furnish dismounted Marine rifle squads with a portable beyond-line-of-sight precision attack capability. Marine specifications note the munition should ideally also be deployable from “ships and aircraft,” be able to safely land or crash (with reusability ideal but not strictly required), and ideally be able to recover from electronic warfare attacks.

The term ‘organic’ means these loitering munition are to be embedded inside (‘organic to’) regular frontline combat units, rather than detached to some specialized drone unit. That implies OPF-L drones distributed across the force in quantity under direct control of frontline soldiers, not allocated at the whims of a separate upper-echelon command.

Two other companies, Anduril and AeroVironment, have also been awarded money by the Marine Corps for OPF-L. The Corps insists that following the evaluation phase, it may procure more than one of the OPF-L entrants.

AeroVironment has received $8.9 million to furnish the latest Block 20 variant of Switchblade-300. This model, controlled via a new tablet interface, is billed has having been improved based on combat experience from the hundreds of Switchblades donated to Ukraine. It includes a new armor-piercing EFP warhead, ability to attack targets from steeper angles, new panning electro-optical/thermal cameras, extended command-link range, and increased battery life doubling endurance to over 20 minutes.

Anduril’s still-unnamed OPF-L entry is known to be a novel, vertical-takeoff capable quad-rotor. Anduril claims this design incorporates technologies for “…safe return-to-base, advanced tracking and guidance systems, and optimized terminal engagement to increase effectiveness and reduce cognitive burden in dynamic tactical environments.”

This implies that it’s also designed for recoverability should no target be found, as well as for relative simplicity of use, and automatic target designation and tracking during the final attack phase.

Meanwhile, SOCOM and the Marine Corps have independently selected Israeli company UVision’s Hero-120SF and Hero-30SFR loitering munitions for ‘heavier’, medium-range components of the GOPSS and OPF programs. These have an unfolding X-shaped profile akin to Russia’s Lancet drone and larger anti-tank capable warheads.

Meanwhile, the Army is initially testing the larger anti-tank capable Switchblade-600 for its own organic loitering munition program called LASSO.

Loitering munitions and the cost conundrum

Western manufacturers can build loitering munitions that are more refined, reliable, accurate and convenient than those Russia and Ukraine are hurling at each other over Ukraine. But it’s nowhere near able to produce loitering munitions as inexpensive and in such quantities.

Ukrainians and Russians are manufacturing tens of thousands of FPVs monthly, many assembled from their homes at a price of $500 or less, and rarely more than thousands of dollars.

By contrast, Shepherd Media estimates the beefier Hero-120 loitering munitions being adopted by the Marines have a flyaway unit cost of $150,00, for example. Switchblade-300, in production for over a decade, averaged nearly $53,000 per shot in 2023 per budget documents.

The 127 Rogue 1s ordered by the Marines average out to $94,000 apiece, but that contract involves additional services and components, so the actual ‘flyaway’ unit price is lower. “Much more than hardware is required as part of that contract value,” Bills told PopMech, arguing Rogue 1 is “extraordinarily price competitive compared to other loitering munitions,” particularly when factoring in its safe recovery and reusability features.

Of course, there’s also a big qualitative difference, with minimal-cost FPV kamikaze drones used in Ukraine requiring a high degree of piloting skill, and experiencing many failures for every successful attack. By contrast, Western loitering munitions are designed to be easy for soldiers to adopt with limited training thanks to automatic attack features.

Furthermore, should one of the services commit to procuring a specific loitering munition in truly large quantities, economies of scale should kick in to some degree. That has yet to truly happen.

Still, it’s hard to fully discount that the market price of many Western loitering munitions could pay for 100 to 200 cruder ones assembled by Ukraine and Russia. Despite their shortcomings, they now account for a majority of battlefield losses of armored vehicles in that conflict.

Finding the right balance between quantity and quality remains an ongoing challenge. For now, Teledyne-FLIR argues that reusability, flexible payloads, resilience versus electronic warfare, and quality cameras are Rogue 1’s added values for its one-way mission.