The Russia-Ukraine war has ushered in a new era of unmanned combat. Investors and the Pentagon are betting that AeroVironment can produce deadly drones at an industrial scale.morning in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains north of Los Angeles, Wahid Nawabi, the CEO of drone maker AeroVironment, is bouncing down a dirt road in a Chevy Traverse. Somewhere in the skies overhead, one of his company’s gull-winged Puma electric surveillance planes is hunting for us – quietly and autonomously.
Switchblade 300 , described by AeroVironment employees as a Pringles can with wings, and its larger cousin, the Switchblade 600.Starting in 2022, the U.S. supplied Ukraine with 700 Switchblade 300s, a $50,000 missile small enough to be carried in a soldier’s rucksack and launched with minimal effort. It was quietly used by U.S. special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade to take down “high-value” insurgents at a distance of as much as 6 miles.
But AeroVironment, which has quietly been the Defense Department’s main supplier of small drones for the past two decades, may have the relationships, technology and industrial experience to better satisfy the U.S. military’s sudden desire for unmanned systems en masse. And the interest in loitering munitions goes beyond ground troops: the Navy, Marines and Army are experimenting with packing them into launchers on boats, helicopters and armored vehicles.
If peace were to break out tomorrow between Russia and Ukraine, AeroVironment would still have big opportunities in a world where the thinking has changed about how wars can be fought, defense analysts say. When the company went public in 2007, the same year MacCready passed away, its small drone business was thriving, booking $146 million in revenue. By 2013, the company could boast that it had made 86% of the drones in the DoD’s inventory. Most of those were Ravens: AeroVironment has made 25,000, which the company says makes it the most-produced military aircraft in history.
“We're at an inflection point because what we bet on the last seven, eight years is becoming a reality,” he said. Meanwhile defense tech startups may be able to field flashy prototypes, but they don’t have the know-how AeroVironment has developed to turn them into something that can be manufactured at scale, he says.
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