On a hot August morning in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains north of Los Angeles, Wahid Nawabi, the CEO of drone maker AeroVironment, is bouncing down a dirt road in a Chevy Traverse. Somewhere in the skies overhead, one of his company’s gull-winged Puma electric surveillance planes is hunting for us – quietly and autonomously.
The trim, affable Nawabi shares the screen of a tablet computer that shows an aerial view of the grassy canyon we’re driving through relayed from the Puma, 1,300 of which have been supplied to Ukraine for the price tag of $318 million. It’s using computer vision to navigate, comparing landmarks to internal maps as it zeros in on a target it can autonomously seek: a tank, rocket launcher or in this case, a white SUV. They’re capabilities AeroVironment deployed in Ukraine last year to overcome Russian jamming of GPS signals and communications links.
“Look, it found us,” says Nawabi, pointing out our vehicle, which now appears on the tablet display outlined in a white box.
Wahid Nawabi by Ethan Pines for Forbes
In the Russo-Ukrainian war, what might come next is a pinpoint strike from the deadly Switchblade, a weapon central to Nawabi’s ambitions to make AeroVironment a multibillion-dollar company in the next three to five years, up from $717 million in revenue in its fiscal 2024.
Switchblade is a loitering munition, an expensive type of one-way kamikaze drone designed to circle the battlefield awaiting a good opportunity to obliterate its target. Both the Russians and Ukrainians are using them in a war where dense networks of antiaircraft systems have pushed fighter jets and bombers to the margins.
Switchblade 300 (right), described by AeroVironment employees as a Pringles can with wings, and its larger cousin, the Switchblade 600.
Starting in 2022, the U.S. supplied Ukraine with 700 Switchblade 300s, a $50,000 missile small enough to be carried in a soldier’s rucksack and launched with minimal effort. It was quietly used by U.S. special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past decade to take down “high-value” insurgents at a distance of as much as 6 miles. More recently, Ukraine has been hunting valuable Russian air defense batteries with a newer, larger version, the Switchblade 600, a $200,000 weapon with 25-mile range. Ukraine has received hundreds, with another 600 promised in a recent U.S. aid package.
The Ukraine war has been a buzzing laboratory for unmanned aircraft, where makers test and improve their designs. AeroVironment’s got off to a rough start against Russian electronic warfare, which reportedly has hampered many sophisticated Western drones, but the company is now looking like one of the winners. (Nawabi says modifications to overcome jamming and better training have pushed Switchblade’s effectiveness rate north of 80%.)
Last month, the Army handed AeroVironment a contract worth up to $990 million – the company’s largest ever – to cover Switchblade purchases through 2029. And the company is in the running for contracts from other branches of the military and foreign allies as they accelerate their adoption of drones based on their deadly effectiveness in Ukraine.
Plenty of companies are chasing the opportunity: A study last year by the Vertical Flight Society counted 123 entities in 32 countries that were producing one-way attack drones. They include the Israeli pioneers of loitering munitions, like Elbit Systems, and buzzy defense-tech startups like Anduril, which has supplied a larger, longer-range, winged drone, the Altius 600, to Ukraine in undisclosed numbers. Anduril recently raised $1.5 billion and is plowing some of that into building a giant 1.5-million square foot factory called Arsenal-1.
But AeroVironment, which has quietly been the Defense........