A Silicone Valley defense contractor (yep) says it’s come up with a relatively inexpensive high-speed jet drone to counteract the drone swarms that are reshaping war half a world away. Both Ukraine and Russia are becoming increasingly reliant on pilotless kamikaze drones that can loiter invisibly for hours and pounce on unsuspecting targets with high explosive payloads. The hunter becomes the hunted when Anduril’s new Roadrunner is on station. It will use artificial intelligence to identify targets, but a person will pull the trigger to destroy them. “Our driving belief is that there has to be human agency for identifying and classifying a threat, and there has to be human accountability for any action that gets taken against that threat,” Christian Brose, chief strategy officer at Anduril, told Wired.
Functionally, the drone borrows an idea from an interesting but wholly impractical aircraft developed in the early 1950s, the Convair XFY-1 Pogo. The Pogo was designed to take off and land vertically from its crisscrossed tail and although it did that (precariously) it really couldn’t do much else. The patio-heater-sized Anduril blasts out of its own self-contained hangar that looks like a portable toilet. It can then fly at high subsonic speeds to the operation area and hunt for enemy drones. If it doesn’t find any, it can fly back to the tiny hanger and land vertically through the top hatch.
