AeroVironment Puma
AeroVironment's hand-launched, battery-powered fixed-wing surveillance drone, designated RQ-20 by the US military.
AeroVironment routed a US$30m Puma order into Germany's LARUS counter-drone reconnaissance programme through NATO's procurement agency on 7 July 2026, taking the hand-launched surveillance drone into a new European market.
Last refreshed: 1 October 2026
Timeline for AeroVironment Puma
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Drones: Industry & DefenceBackground
The AeroVironment Puma is a small, battery-powered, hand-launched fixed-wing drone for surveillance, designated RQ-20 by the US military. It first flew in 2007 and entered service in 2008 with US Special Operations Command. It carries optical and infrared cameras and flies for more than two hours on a charge.
Variants include the Puma AE, the long-endurance Puma LE, which stretches flight time to about 5.5 hours, and the maritime Puma 3 AE, which can land on water. Alongside the Raven, Puma won the US Army's small drone programme after AeroVironment's 2012 purchase of Procerus Technologies added autopilot software to its small-drone line.
The type is in service with Ukraine and several NATO members, and Germany's LARUS programme added a US$30m order through NSPA in July 2026.
Puma enters Germany's LARUS programme
On 7 July 2026 AeroVironment placed a US$30m Puma Systems Stack order into LARUS, Germany's counter-drone reconnaissance programme, through the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA). The NSPA catalogue let a US maker sell Puma to a single NATO member without a bilateral foreign military sale, the slower government-to-government route.
For Puma, LARUS counts as European market access rather than US federal revenue. The order landed in the same week that Italy's Ministry of Defence granted AeroVironment a type designation for its MQ-31A, so the German Puma sale formed half of a two-country push into NATO markets inside seven days.