U.S. Army begins testing four rival drones for future soldiers

A U.S. Army initiative wants ordinary infantry soldiers carrying nothing more than a backpack to be able to spot a tank down the road and simply send a drone to destroy it, and that vision just moved through another round of testing in the Arizona desert.

Yuma Proving Ground is conducting risk reduction testing of four vendors for the Low Altitude Stalking and Striking Ordnance initiative, known as LASSO, an emerging U.S. Army program intended to put loitering munitions directly into soldiers’ hands by the summer of 2028, according to a report published August 3, 2026, in The Outpost, Yuma Proving Ground’s official publication.

Product Manager Precision Strike & Reconnaissance Systems, the Army office overseeing the program, is running the evaluations, which fall under the Army’s broader family of Launched Effects systems, weapons designed to give infantry units their own organic strike capability rather than depending entirely on artillery or air support.

A loitering munition is a small, uncrewed aircraft armed with a warhead that flies to a general target area, circles overhead searching for something worth hitting, and then deliberately crashes into that target, destroying both the aircraft and whatever it strikes in what the military calls a one-way attack. Walter McCormick, a test engineer with the Aviation Systems and Electronic Test Division, explained the basic concept behind how LASSO assets are meant to function in the field.

“Soldiers would be patrolling an area. A couple of miles down, there’s a tank up the road. They would send one of these up to fly over and take the tank out,” McCormick said.

McCormick emphasized that while the underlying concept of a loitering munition is not new, LASSO’s defining feature is how compact and portable the Army wants the final system to be.

“They are backpack portable, one or two people can launch it, and you don’t need a lot of support asset,” McCormick said.

That portability distinguishes LASSO from many existing loitering munitions that require larger launch tubes, dedicated vehicles, or multiple support personnel to operate. According to the report, soldiers would carry their own fire control system and fly the munition much like any commercial drone, using a camera equipped with both a daytime channel and an infrared sensor to spot heat signatures, then fly the weapon out to the general target area, identify the actual target, and initiate the strike. The systems also support waypoint following, meaning an operator can program a set of coordinates that sends the munition airborne to autonomously patrol a designated area before the human operator steps back in to confirm and engage the target, keeping a person directly involved in the final decision to strike rather than allowing the weapon to select and attack a target entirely on its own.

Multiple companies have already secured Army agreements tied to the broader LASSO effort in recent months, giving the program’s four-vendor testing lineup real commercial weight behind it. AeroVironment announced in May 2026 that its Switchblade 400 medium-range, man-portable anti-armor loitering munition had been selected for a LASSO prototype agreement, building on the company’s existing five-year, $990 million contract supplying earlier Switchblade variants to the Army. Textron Systems separately announced in February 2026 that its Damocles loitering munition, built around an explosively formed penetrator warhead and integrated with a vertical takeoff and landing aircraft requiring no launch or recovery equipment, had won its own LASSO prototype agreement. UVision, working in partnership with Mistral, saw its HERO-90 loitering munition selected by the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier for LASSO participation, a system that allows a single operator to launch the weapon within two minutes and supports configurable warheads along with the ability to abort or re-engage a mission mid-flight.

Tim Van Goethem, a Product Manager Precision Strike & Reconnaissance Systems test engineer who has attended multiple rounds of testing at Yuma, described the current phase as part of a broader, staged evaluation process.

“As part of another risk reduction test, we are going to be testing four times here in Yuma. This is the first step, and we will have the live-fire warhead test in November,” Van Goethem said.

Before any explosive testing takes place, Yuma Proving Ground conducts extensive safety validation on each system. Test Officer Myra Angulo, who was on-site for the initial round of testing, explained the specific safety checks her team runs before introducing live warheads into the process.

“They are testing their lost link to make sure it returns to where it is supposed to. They check the geo-fence, which is a safety boundary so when it’s armed, it doesn’t leave the fly box,” Angulo said.

Beyond those safety flights, the four test systems will undergo rigorous conditioning chambers, rough handling procedures, and climate testing before concluding with high-explosive flight tests specifically designed to assess each system’s reliability and durability under realistic field conditions. Van Goethem, reflecting on the testing campaign’s progress, described the results so far in positive terms.

“So far, it’s gone pretty well. I appreciate all the support we have been given at YPG and I hope to have many more tests out here in the future,” Van Goethem said.

Yuma Proving Ground’s role carries direct weight in shaping which vendor or vendors ultimately reach soldiers, since the data collected during this testing campaign will inform Product Manager Precision Strike & Reconnaissance Systems’ broader fielding decisions. McCormick summarized the program’s ultimate objective in blunt terms.

“The overall goal is to get all four vendors fielded and then from there start seeing the differences,” McCormick said.