Large Loitering Munition

Long-range, large-warhead loitering munition designed for strategic strike. Navigates by GPS/INS to pre-programmed targets over hundreds or thousands of kilometres; 2026 variants add onboard electro-optical seekers with machine-vision AI for terminal target acquisition, defeating GPS spoofing and enabling strikes on moving or relocated targets. Designed for saturation attacks that overwhelm air defences — a low-cost cruise-missile substitute produced in the thousands per month. Tactical employment is doctrinal and mass-driven: launches are batched in waves of dozens to over a hundred airframes routed along multiple axes, mixing decoys and real warheads to force the defender to expend high-cost interceptors on low-cost targets. Terminal approach is low-altitude to defeat medium-range radars, with cruise legs above the small-arms envelope but well below fighter and long-range SAM sweet spots — the geometry is deliberately inconvenient for every existing defence. Machine-vision seeker variants close the last kill loop autonomously: once the aircraft is within visual range of the target class it was trained on, GPS spoofing and INS drift stop mattering. The defensive problem is arithmetic. Medium-range SAMs and fighter cannon kill this platform reliably per engagement, but at a per-round cost that inverts the exchange ratio; interceptor drones and gun-based C-UAS shift the ratio back toward the defender but require dense coverage of every likely ingress corridor. High-power microwave and laser systems close the cost gap once fielded at scale, but 2025–2026 fielding remains partial. Recent combat observations: sustained saturation campaigns against Ukrainian energy and port infrastructure with launches reaching 5,000+ per month by late 2025 (ISIS analytical review), jet-powered variants entering serial production from early 2025 with speeds near 600 km/h (UAS Vision), a 2026 seeker variant flown into a Ukrainian grain ship in the Danube delta with jamming ineffective against its onboard machine-vision guidance (Euromaidan Press Jul 2026), and the 170-airframe Iranian direct strike on Israel in April 2024 as the canonical demonstration that even near-total interception by a layered defence is economically unsustainable at scale (CSIS Drone Saturation, RUSI Air War).