13APR

Switchblade 400 wins Army LASSO at $1.2bn ceiling

4 min read

13:26UTC

The US Army selected AeroVironment's Switchblade 400 under the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance OTA on Monday 4 May. The Army is requesting $110 million in FY2027 procurement with a planned ceiling of approximately $1.2 billion through FY2031.

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Key takeaway

Anti-tank loitering reach jumped from 10 km to 65 km in one Army selection.

The US Army selected AeroVironment's Switchblade 400 under the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (LASSO) Other Transaction Authority on Monday 4 May ¹. The Army is requesting $110 million in LASSO procurement for fiscal year 2027 (FY2027) with a planned ceiling of approximately $1.2 billion through FY2031 ². Annualised, that funds roughly 200 to 400 Switchblade-class munitions a year against the Pentagon's 300,000-drone procurement target. AeroVironment declined to disclose the prototype contract value.

Switchblade 400 has a 65 km range, 35-minute endurance, and an all-up weight of 39 lbs, deployable by a single soldier in under five minutes with day-night electro-optical / infrared (EO/IR) sensors and autonomous target recognition. In practice, that pulls Russian armoured columns inside loitering reach from 6.2 miles to over 40. The 400 sits between the existing Block 2 SB 600 and SB 300 already running under an $1 billion August 2024 contract and a $186 million February 2026 delivery order. AeroVironment now operates SB 300, SB 400, and SB 600 simultaneously inside Army programmes, the broadest US loitering munition coverage on offer.

The Pentagon's Lethality Prize and the Mountain Horse Solutions kinetic win sit alongside this award inside the same Gauntlet II munitions architecture. Anti-tank loitering reach jumping from 10 km to 65 km changes which echelon owns the deep-strike fires problem: brigade rather than divisional artillery.

A $1.2 billion ceiling spread across six fiscal years averages $200 million annually, modest against the $54.6 billion DAWG line and well below the volume the Pentagon's stated 300,000-drone target would imply. The annual run rate places LASSO inside the procurement-frame envelope rather than the production-rate envelope that DAWG would otherwise fund.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

A loitering munition is a drone that can fly to an area, circle while searching for a target, and then dive to destroy it. Think of it as a guided missile that can wait. The Switchblade 400 is an American version that a single soldier can carry and launch, and it can fly 65 km, more than 40 miles, before finding and hitting a target. The US Army has now chosen it as the standard weapon for this role, with up to $1.2 billion available to buy them through 2031. In practical terms, this means American ground troops could attack enemy tanks from a distance that was simply not possible with previous weapons, without needing aircraft or artillery.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The 65 km selection over shorter-range alternatives traces to two constraints absent from previous loitering-munition competitions.

First, the brigade-echelon targeting gap. The Army's FY2027 doctrine update identified a specific gap: no organic weapon could engage armoured vehicles beyond the reach of line-of-sight optics but inside the range envelope where Air Force close air support assets face unacceptable crew risk from integrated air defences. The 65 km figure was not chosen arbitrarily: it is the minimum range that closes that gap while staying inside the radio-link budget of man-portable ground-control equipment.

Second, AeroVironment's head start from the Block 2 SB 300 programme. The LASSO solicitation explicitly valued prior-programme investment and fielded-system data from the $1 billion August 2024 contract. AeroVironment enters LASSO with two years of Army range safety, logistics, and maintenance data already on file. Competitors starting from a clean sheet face a 12-18 month head start disadvantage that the OTA vehicle does not fully equalise.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Israel's Spike-NLOS anti-tank missile extended the engagement boundary from 8 km to 32 km when it entered IDF service in the 1990s. Spike-NLOS changed Israeli armoured doctrine by allowing fire from behind terrain masking, with the operator never requiring line of sight.

LASSO extends this further: 65 km with a loitering profile means a weapon can be dispatched to a grid reference and wait for a target to appear, rather than requiring an existing target designation at launch.

Counter-parallel: The US Dragon anti-tank missile in the 1970s promised a range-and-accuracy combination that operators found unreliable under field conditions and the weapon was phased out. LASSO's Other Transaction Authority mechanism bypasses the full milestone-based development process that caught the Dragon's integration flaws early, which is both its speed advantage and its validation risk.

The $1.2 billion LASSO ceiling through FY2031 averages roughly $200 million per year. AeroVironment's existing SB 300 programme runs a parallel $1 billion August 2024 contract and a $186 million February 2026 delivery order. Across SB 300, SB 400, and SB 600, AeroVironment's Army loitering munitions portfolio now reaches approximately $2.4 billion in contracted ceiling value.

The LASSO award also increases AeroVironment's leverage in the EHEL directed-energy competition, where the company delivered its LOCUST X3 to RCCTO in March 2026 , demonstrating the multi-programme dependence that Army programme offices weigh in contract negotiations.

Consensus view: Bryan Clark at the Hudson Institute assessed the LASSO award as the first Army programme to formally codify the 65 km anti-tank engagement boundary, a figure that shifts brigade-level strike doctrine rather than merely upgrading a weapon.

The Switchblade 400's range means a brigade combat team can engage armoured formations before they enter the 10 km radius where legacy anti-tank guided missiles were the only option. That is not an increment: it rewrites the ground-combat engagement sequence.

Counter-view: IISS's military balance analysis from February 2026 noted that loitering munitions above 40 km range face a navigation accuracy problem in GPS-denied environments that EO/IR sensors alone cannot fully compensate for.

The Switchblade 400's autonomous target recognition at 65 km has not yet been validated under Russian-grade electronic warfare jamming. Ukrainian battlefield data on the existing Block 2 SB 600 is the closest proxy, and it suggests GPS-denied accuracy degrades meaningfully beyond 30 km.

Key tension: Whether the 65 km figure represents an operationally validated range under contested-spectrum conditions or a manufacturer-specified maximum under permissive test environments.

Sources:AeroVironment·DefenseScoop

Mentions:Lethality Prize Challenge →Mountain Horse Solutions →IISS →US Army →Gauntlet II →Israel →Pentagon →Defense Autonomous Warfare Group →Switchblade 400 →LASSO →AeroVironment →

First Reported In

Update #8 · The week defence-AI got priced

AeroVironment· 10 May 2026

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Causes and effects

Caused by

Lethality Prize feeds Gauntlet II cycle

Pentagon Lethality Prize and Gauntlet II architecture created the procurement environment in which LASSO selection occurred.

Occurred 14 Apr 2026

Read story →

Mountain Horse wins first Lethality Prize

Mountain Horse Solutions Lethality Prize win sits alongside LASSO in the same Gauntlet II munitions architecture, contextualising the AeroVironment LASSO award.

Occurred 29 Apr 2026

Read story →

This Event

Switchblade 400 wins Army LASSO at $1.2bn ceiling

The Switchblade 400 sextuples anti-tank loitering reach from 10 km to 65 km, changing the brigade combat team strike envelope. AeroVironment now operates SB 300, SB 400, and SB 600 simultaneously inside Army programmes, the broadest US loitering munition coverage on offer. The $1.2 billion ceiling spread across six fiscal years averages $200 million annually, modest against the $54.6 billion DAWG line.

Different Perspectives

Procurement sceptics

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Chinese component suppliers

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Quantum Systems

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United Kingdom

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JIATF-401

The task force handed AeroVironment a $500 million counter-drone ceiling identical to Perennial Autonomy's from seven weeks earlier, while its own Gauntlet II red team prepares to attack the drones the winners of that sprint will build. It expects to keep several qualified suppliers warm rather than certify one.

DroneShield

DroneShield appointed retired Rear Admiral Lee Goddard as an independent director from 1 July, its second board move since founder Oleg Vornik's April exit. The ASIC probe into November's disclosures and share sales stays open, so the admiral steadies the story without closing the file.