Anvil

Anvil is Anduril Industries’ counter-unmanned-aircraft-system interceptor — a quadcopter designed to neutralise hostile drones by ramming them out of the sky. Anduril unveiled the system in 2021 as the kinetic effector in its broader counter-UAS stack, which pairs Sentry surveillance towers and the Lattice software platform with an interceptor that closes the loop on a detected threat.

The interception sequence is the heart of the Anvil concept. Sentry towers, ground-based radars, and other sensors feed Lattice, which fuses tracks across the network and presents an operator with a single decision: engage or hold. On approval, an Anvil launches from a forward storage box, climbs to the cued altitude, and runs an autonomous pursuit profile against the target. Final guidance is on-board and high-speed; the impact itself does the killing, so there is no warhead, no fragmentation, and no controlled-detonation footprint to manage on friendly ground. A later variant, Anvil-M, adds a small explosive payload for harder Group 2 and Group 3 targets — including one-way attack drones such as the Shahed-136 — where pure kinetic ramming alone may not consistently take the target down.

The US Department of Defense has been the dominant customer. Special Operations Command was an early Anduril counter-UAS adopter, and the US Marine Corps awarded a multi-year counter-UAS contract that bundled Sentry, Lattice, and Anvil into a single fielded system. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence is the most public allied operator; a procurement announced in 2024 brought Anvil-derived interceptors into the British counter-drone inventory. Anduril does not publish unit counts, and combat use is described only obliquely — the system has been part of US counter-UAS deployments in theatres where small drones and loitering munitions are an active threat.

Anvil sits in a counter-UAS niche that has tightened sharply since the Shahed campaigns in Ukraine forced Western militaries to think about cheap, defendable interceptors rather than million-dollar missiles. Competing concepts range from gun-based hard-kill turrets to electronic-warfare jammers and other kinetic interceptors such as Raytheon’s Coyote. What distinguishes Anvil is the bet that an autonomous quadcopter, networked through Anduril Industries ’ Lattice and triggered by its own sensor mesh, can replace a human-in-the-loop air defence crew at the bottom rung of the threat ladder — a practical answer to the drone-versus-drone problem the war in Ukraine has made unavoidable.