00:00Today on Forbes, this U.S. company is cashing in on Ukraine's war with killer drones that
00:07fit in a backpack.
00:10On a hot August morning in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains north of Los Angeles,
00:15Waheed Nawabi, the CEO of drone maker Aerovironment, is bouncing down a dirt road in a Chevy Traverse.
00:23Somewhere in the skies overhead, one of his company's gull-winged Puma electric surveillance
00:28planes is hunting Nawabi and a Forbes reporter riding with him, and it's doing so quietly
00:34and autonomously.
00:36The trim, affable Nawabi shares the screen of a tablet computer that shows an aerial
00:41view of the grassy canyon they're driving through, relayed from the Puma.
00:46Thirteen hundred of these very small planes have been supplied to Ukraine for the price
00:50tag of $318 million.
00:53It uses computer vision to navigate, comparing landmarks to internal maps as it zeroes in
00:59on a target it can autonomously seek, a tank, rocket launcher, or in this case, a white
01:05SUV.
01:06They are capabilities Aerovironment deployed in Ukraine last year to overcome Russian jamming
01:11of GPS signals and communications links.
01:15Nawabi, pointing to the vehicle they're riding in, which now appears on the tablet display,
01:20outlined in a white box, says, quote,
01:23Look, it found us.
01:26In the Russo-Ukrainian war, what might come next is a pinpoint strike from something else.
01:31The deadly Switchblade, a weapon central to Nawabi's ambitions to make Aerovironment a
01:36multi-billion dollar company in the next three to five years, up from $717 million in revenue
01:43in its fiscal 2024.
01:46The Switchblade is a loitering munition, an expensive type of one-way kamikaze drone designed
01:51to circle the battlefield, awaiting a good opportunity to obliterate its target.
01:57Both the Russians and Ukrainians are using them in a war where dense networks of anti-aircraft
02:01systems have pushed fighter jets and bombers to the margins.
02:06Starting in 2022, the U.S. supplied Ukraine with 700 Switchblade 300s, a $50,000 missile
02:14small enough to be carried in a soldier's rucksack and launched with minimal effort.
02:18It was quietly used by U.S. special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade
02:24to take down high-value insurgents at a distance of as much as six miles.
02:29More recently, Ukraine has been hunting valuable Russian air defense batteries with a newer,
02:34larger version, the Switchblade 600, a $200,000 weapon with a 25-mile range.
02:42Ukraine has received hundreds, with another 600 promised in a recent U.S. aid package.
02:48The Ukraine war has been a buzzing laboratory for unmanned aircraft, where makers test and
02:53improve their designs.
02:55Aerovironments got off to a rough start against Russian electronic warfare, which reportedly
03:00has hampered many sophisticated Western drones, but the company is now looking like one of
03:05the winners.
03:06Nuavi says modifications to overcome jamming and better training have pushed Switchblade's
03:11effectiveness rate north of 80%.
03:16Last month, the army handed Aerovironment a contract worth up to $990 million, the company's
03:22largest ever, to cover Switchblade purchases through 2029.
03:27And the company is in the running for contracts from other branches of the military and foreign
03:31allies as they accelerate their adoption of drones based on their deadly effectiveness
03:36in Ukraine.
03:38Plenty of companies are chasing the opportunity.
03:39A study last year by the Vertical Flight Society counted 123 entities in 32 countries that
03:46were producing one-way attack drones.
03:49They include the Israeli pioneers of loitering munitions, like Elbit Systems, and buzzy defense
03:54tech startups like Anduril, which has supplied a larger, longer-range winged drone, the Altius
04:00600, to Ukraine in undisclosed numbers.
04:04Anduril recently raised $1.5 billion and is plowing some of that into building a giant
04:091.5 million square foot factory called Arsenal One.
04:14But Aerovironment, which has quietly been the Defense Department's main supplier of
04:18small drones for the past two decades, may have the relationships, technology, and industrial
04:24experience to better satisfy the U.S. military's sudden desire for unmanned systems en masse.
04:32For full coverage, check out Jeremy Bogaski's piece on Forbes.com.
04:37This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:40Thanks for tuning in.
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