U.S. Army evaluates autonomous EW drone that hunts jammers

The U.S. Army has evaluated CX2’s Wraith, an autonomous airborne electronic warfare drone capable of geolocating and identifying radio frequency threats without GPS, during Exercise Ivy Mass at Fort Carson, Colorado, with an EW platoon from the 4th Infantry Division executing nearly a dozen autonomous missions over two weeks of operational testing.

Apache Company’s Electronic Warfare Platoon, 4-10 Cavalry, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division conducted the evaluation in support of the division’s Next Generation Command and Control initiative, according to CX2’s announcement. The exercise gave Army EW soldiers hands-on operational experience with a system that addresses one of the most consequential gaps in current ground force EW capability: the ability to autonomously find, characterize, and optically confirm enemy electronic emitters in GPS-denied environments without requiring specialist operators or contractor support.

The Wraith is a quadrotor unmanned aerial platform that folds to compact dimensions of 15 by 48.5 by 20 inches for transport and storage. It integrates radio frequency sensors with electro-optical and infrared gimballed optics, giving the system the ability to first detect and characterize an emitter through its RF signature and then optically confirm the target in a single autonomous sortie. That sensor fusion in one airborne package is what separates the Wraith from conventional ground-based RF sensing equipment: it brings the detection and confirmation capability forward, airborne, and autonomous rather than requiring separate ISR and EW assets to coordinate across different elements of a formation.

The GPS-independent navigation is the technical characteristic that defines the Wraith’s operational relevance for the threat environment the Army is preparing against. CX2’s Pathfinder navigation software, combined with custom GNSS hardening and layered non-GPS navigation, allows the platform to operate autonomously in environments where GPS is jammed, spoofed, or degraded. An autonomous EW drone that depends on uncontested GPS is a system an adversary can neutralize before it launches its first mission.

The Wraith’s architecture specifically addresses that vulnerability, navigating and completing missions through contested electromagnetic environments using onboard processing rather than satellite navigation.

Identifying a threat requires matching a detected emission against known signature databases, distinguishing jammers from radars from communications systems, and delivering a confident assessment in a complex electromagnetic environment where dozens of signals may be present simultaneously. That classification output is what converts a detection into actionable intelligence the Ground Force Commander can act on without additional analysis. During Exercise Ivy Mass, Wraith delivered exactly that product to the 4-10 Cavalry’s ground commanders, enabling them to find and fix enemy positions across the area of operations and supporting freedom of maneuver for adjacent units, per CX2’s announcement.

The Army’s electronic warfare capability atrophied significantly during the counterinsurgency period, when adversaries with sophisticated EW arsenals were not the operational priority. Ukraine changed that calculus definitively. The evaluation of the Wraith at Fort Carson in May 2026 represents one formation’s answer to the question every armored brigade commander in Europe is asking: how do I find the jammers and radars before they find me, in an environment where I cannot count on GPS? Apache Company’s EW platoon spent two weeks learning one answer.