Thales plans to arm Bushmaster with German kamikaze drones

German drone maker STARK and Thales Australia have agreed to fit STARK’s Cascade loitering munition to the Bushmaster armored vehicle, giving the Australian-built truck a launcher for one-way attack drones that the company says can hit targets up to 100 km (62 miles) away.

The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding on Oct. 7 at the Land Forces 2026 exhibition in Perth, Western Australia, where Thales Australia unveiled its latest Bushmaster configuration a day earlier. STARK said the partnership is meant to promote the development, production and deployment of loitering munitions in Australia. Neither company has announced a customer, and the Australian Army has not said it plans to buy the combination.

Loitering munitions are small drones that fly to a target area, search for a target and then dive into it with an explosive warhead. Cascade is launched from a tube, which STARK says makes it easy to add to vehicles and other platforms and lets small mobile units carry their own long-range strike weapon. The company offers it in configurations with ranges of 40 km, 60 km and 100 km, carrying a payload of up to 4.5 kg (10 pounds), and says the launcher can be ready to fire in under a minute.

On the Bushmaster, the drones would be carried in a multi-cell launcher on the rear deck of the new dual-cab version, allowing several to be fired in coordinated groups. Thales Australia says the munitions would let small units strike targets such as command posts, logistics hubs, artillery positions and air defense systems far behind the front line. The same Bushmaster variant shown in Perth also carries Thales’ RapidStriker counter-drone system, so a single vehicle could defend against enemy drones and launch its own.

The Bushmaster is a mine-protected wheeled vehicle built by Thales Australia in Bendigo, Victoria. It has served with the Australian Army for more than two decades and is also used by the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Japan, and Australia has sent more than 100 to Ukraine since 2022.

STARK, founded in Germany in 2024, unveiled Cascade in June at the ILA Berlin air show. It has since launched the drone from its Vanta unmanned surface vessel, and in September British vehicle maker North Defence said it would integrate Cascade on its light vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles. The company’s larger Virtus loitering munition, which takes off vertically, has been tested by the German Bundeswehr, including in an AI-enabled drone swarm exercise in April, and Germany’s parliament approved a purchase of Virtus and Helsing’s HX-2 in February.