US Army equips MRR programme UAS with 50 mm round
Engineers at US Army Combat Capabilties Development Command have developed a lethal payload for UAS, called the Scalable Precision Explosive Airdrop Round. (Janes/Meredith Roaten)
The US Army's Medium Range Reconnaissance (MRR) programme of record unmanned aerial systems (UASs) can now carry a lethal munition with rudimentary GPS guidance, developers told Janes on 7 May.
During Exercise ‘African Lion 26', the army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) equipped Anduril's Ghost-X and PDW's C-100 systems with XM1204 50 mm High Explosive Airburst munitions, dubbed the Scalable Precision Explosive Airdrop Round (SPEAR), said Paul Turrisi-Chung, armaments project officer for DEVCOM‘s UAS Munitions Programs. The capability is on time to meet a September or October 2026 timeline for fielding, he said.
The munition weighs fewer than 5 lbs and is designed to be integrated with Group 1 and 2 UAS. The warhead has a programmable airburst fuze and can do point detonation. The process started out with studies to “figure out what was the proper airframe size to get to use an off-the-shelf warhead that we really have qualified for speed and rapidity”, he said.
A static drop from the Ghost-X platform in February 2026 was the first live fire test with 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The army also designed the dropper box, which drops the lethal warhead from the UAS, and the ground control station. “When the soldier's ready, once they fly to the target, they will then activate the system, lift up these two firing triggers, and then press them both forward, and that will then drop,” Turrisi-Chung said.
“As long as they drop within the basket of where they're trying to get to, this ammunition will then generally steer to target,” he said.
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