GDELS and ARMMO team up on mobile anti-drone system

Spanish drone maker ARMMO Defense Technologies and General Dynamics European Land Systems’ Spanish unit, Santa Bárbara Sistemas, launched and flew ARMMO’s Bandit-X interceptor drone from an ASCOD Heavy Mission Carrier tracked armored vehicle during the ATLAS 26 counter-drone exercise in Huelva, Spain, turning the heavy vehicle into a mobile launcher for drones that hunt down other drones.

The two companies announced the demonstration on Oct. 27, 2026, along with a cooperation agreement to develop and integrate autonomous systems on armored vehicles and other ground platforms, and they said the launch was carried out in front of senior Spanish and NATO officers, including Spain’s Chief of the Defence Staff, Adm. Gen. Manuel Teodoro López Calderón, and Adm. Pierre Vandier, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation.

The launcher had already been spotted at the exercise, when Defence Blog reported that a tracked ASCOD carrier was seen with box-shaped launch containers marked with ARMMO’s logo on its open rear deck at the Médano del Loro training range, where ATLAS 26 ran from Oct. 19 to Oct. 23 under the direction of the Spanish Army’s Anti-Aircraft Artillery Command.

Bandit-X is a high-speed interceptor built to find and destroy hostile unmanned aircraft, and ARMMO says it flies at more than 360 km/h (224 mph), with plans to push that to 420 km/h (261 mph), stays in the air for 20 to 25 minutes and has an estimated operational range of 40 to 50 km (25 to 31 miles), depending on conditions and mission profile.

The company says the drone can navigate on its own when satellite navigation is jammed or denied, resists electronic interference and guides itself autonomously in the final phase of an intercept, and that it was validated during NATO experimental activities in Slovakia in 2026 and has been assigned a NATO Stock Number, which lets allied militaries identify and order it through their common logistics catalog.

The ASCOD Heavy Mission Carrier is a modular tracked platform from Santa Bárbara Sistemas that can be fitted for ground-based air defense, artillery, fire support, heavy recovery, logistics, electronic warfare, medical evacuation and counter-drone missions, and it uses the NEVA open digital architecture, built to NATO’s Generic Vehicle Architecture standard, so that systems from other companies can be added to the vehicle.

ARMMO, which operates an industrial site of more than 30,000 square meters (323,000 square feet) in Zafra, in Spain’s Badajoz province, also builds unmanned ground and surface vehicles and electronic warfare systems, and the agreement with Santa Bárbara Sistemas sets up a framework for putting its autonomous technologies on a range of ground vehicles.