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Red Cat Holdings [RCAT] has said it’s expecting a low-rate production order “very soon” for the Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) small drone program, noting the service’s plan for a “significant” fielding ramp up next fiscal year.
Jeff Thompson, CEO of Red Cat, told Defense Daily the forthcoming order for its Black Widow small UAS is expected to be followed by a full-rate production award in early FY ‘26 that could total around $220 million to support scaling up the SRR effort.
“The fielding schedules are pretty darn aggressive,” Thompson said.
After participating in the competitive SRR Tranche 2 prototyping effort, the Army announced in November 2024 it had selected Red Cat’s Black Widow sUAS for fielding over Skydio’s X10D small drone offering. Red Cat said at the time that procurement for the SRR program of record could cover nearly 6,000 systems (Defense Daily, Nov. 20 2024).
The Army has said SRR is intended to provide platoons with small drones that offer real-time reconnaissance, security, and target acquisition capabilities.
Red Cat has previously noted the Black Widow sUAS’ capabilities include AI-aided target identification, tracking and classification software, forward-looking obstacle avoidance, a stealth mode to execute missions with radios off, a quiet acoustic signature and modularity to allow for “seamless” secondary payload integration.
The imminent LRIP order, which the Army calls TD-3, is expected before the end of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30 and that deliveries would occur within 90 days of award. Thompson said that prior budget documents stated the deal may cover about 250 systems, with a system consisting of two drones and one controller.
As the Army then looks to scale up SRR in FY ‘26, Thompson said budget documents outlined plans for a full-rate production contract worth around $220 million, split between around $148 million for drones and $70 million for spares, repairs and training.
Thompson noted that since last fall’s selection for the SRR program of record the Army has awarded it a pair deals, TD-1 and TD-2, worth around $2.8 million covering work to add features ahead of of LRIP and to advance compatibility with the Army-developed Universal Controller (UVC) toolkit.
“[The Army] will only buy drones that use UVC. We’re the first company to ever deploy it successfully. We’ve done some recent tests in front of large groups for the Army, all different branches across the Army, all different divisions,” Thompson said. “They wanted to make sure we could [use] the universal controller before we [went into] LRIP.”
The UVC toolkit, utilizing the Army’s UAS Tool software, was integrated on Red Cat’s own controller for the Black Widow drone.
Thompson said Red Cat is capable of building more than 500 Black Widow sUAS a month, with a capacity to expand as needed.
“If they gave us an order for 5,000 [drones] a month, we could get there in two months. If they gave us an order for 10,000 a month, same thing,” Thompson said. “Our supply chain is great. Our production capabilities are great. We’ve expanded our facility.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently signed a memo directing the military services to more aggressively purchase small drones with a goal to widely field these systems by the end of 2026, while Thompson said there was no “Hegseth effect” for SRR as the Army’s plans have been in place for over a year (Defense Daily, July 10).
The Army has laid out its own goal to deliver thousands of small drones over the next year, with an interest in systems that each cost less than $2,000, building off a previous “Purpose-Built Attritable Systems” (PBAS) notice that asked industry for information on small, first person view (FPV) drones that are “production-ready” (Defense Daily, July 8).
Thompson said FPV drones, which have been used extensively by Ukraine, “are great…but they’re not very capable,” citing their lack of visual navigation or electronic warfare-resistant capabilities.
“They’re capable for one thing, mostly, and that’s just kamikaze [use]…In the U.S., we can’t make FPV drones like they make them over there [in Ukraine]. They’d have to be standardized. They’d have to have safety capabilities,” Thompson said. “All the stuff that’s being made in all these other countries are being made with Chinese parts. They’d have to [be made] with U.S. parts. And, frankly, by the time you made a U.S. FPV drone it’s going to be a lot more expensive than the $1,000 per drone like in Ukraine.”
“This is going to sound completely selfish and self-serving, why not just build way more ISR drones,” Thompson added.
Thompson noted Black Widow is the “first scaled platform” to utilize Palantir’s [PLTR] visual navigation capability.
“And their visual navigation is the best on the planet. No one’s going to compete with it,” Thompson said. “The way they do visual navigation is different than everybody else. It’s three different buckets of technology to basically make it as locked in as a GPS without a GPS. Red Cat’s looking to just rip the GPS out of our drones going forward because of [Palantir’s] visual navigation.”
Red Cat announced its partnership with Palantir this past December, noting the company VNav visual navigation software “accelerates the ability to deploy electronic-warfare resistant sUAS without GPS” and is enabled by satellite imagery integration, Alternative PNT source capabilities and Palantir’s Edge Runtime system to run visual navigation algorithms onboard while fully offline.
A Defense Innovation Unit-led event in Alaska last month tested drone systems’ radio communication technologies against electromagnetic interference to assess current challenges (Defense Daily, July 18).
Cal Biesecker contributed to this article
