Your standard rifle can now be an anti-drone weapon. Seriously.

Rebecca French

1 month ago

For most of the last century, if something hostile was flying at your face, your options boiled down to this: Hope someone was around with a big gun. A stinger team. Patriot Batteries. An F-16 is performing an F-16 mission somewhere overhead. The grunts on the ground raised their small weapons, saw the potential threat, and shouted proudly, “Woo, woo.”

Also read: The Infantryman’s 250-Year Quest for a Really Useful Weapon

Drones officially break that arrangement. Cheap, fast, expendable drones are flooding battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East, and they don’t care about your anti-aircraft parachutes. A $500 FPV (first person view) quadcopter equipped with grenades is not needed to defeat a Patriot missile. It just needs to find a soldier that isn’t covered by one.

But this is something no one is really talking about yet, at least not enough: Counter-drone combat has become as personal as strapping to your rifle and loading your magazine.

The counter-drone weapons coming online now are designed to allow any soldier, with minimal training and zero extra nonsense, to put their head up… and fight back.

Some of them already are.

Table of Contents

Toggle

Meet “Pea”

Pea Horoshok anti-drone ammunition — (Ministry of Defense of Ukraine)

Ukraine, as is the case now, got there first out of sheer survival instinct and sheer perseverance.

In mid-2025, Ukraine’s Brave1 Defense Innovation Cluster unveiled a 5.56 mm NATO ammunition nicknamed “Horoshok,” which means “little pea” in Ukrainian. It looks like standard ammunition, fits in standard magazines, and can be fired from any NATO 5.56 rifle already carried by Ukrainian soldiers, including the M4 and CZ Bren.

No new optics are required. No additional batteries required. No need to add ounces to a set that is already heavier than most people bench press.

The difference is what happens after it leaves the barrel. The projectile fragments break into approximately five smaller projectiles, creating a shotgun-like spread at rifle speeds of more than 800 meters per second, nearly twice that of smoothbore shotgun bullets.

A Ukrainian journalist and combatant wrote that he personally shot down several FPV drones with Horoshok shells after using traditional 5.56 ammunition to fail to hit mobile drones. This is a product review that money can’t buy.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense announced plans to expand production to 400,000 rounds per month by December 2025, with the stated goal of having every frontline soldier have at least one anti-drone magazine.

That’s the beauty of it all. A soldier heard the drone, swapped magazines and began engaging. You can even assign soldiers the same way you would an M240 team. There are no new platforms. There are no new training channels. Nothing new needs to be charged overnight, fingers crossed it still has power in the morning. Just plain old ammo.

scope of thinking

Ammo is only half the battle. The other half is actually about hitting a small, fast, crazy target that will scare you while your heart rate is higher than your credit score.

Don’t worry; SMASH fire control systems are built by Israeli company Smart Shooter and come in six varieties.

It mounts on the ubiquitous Picatinny rail, weighs about a pound and a half, and can run for about 70 hours on a single charge. Behind the shell is an artificial intelligence-powered computer running target acquisition software. This is officially the future, y’all.

SMASH tracks the drone like a hungry hawk, allowing the rifle to fire only when a hit is predicted. The soldier pulls the trigger; the computer decides when the bullet leaves the weapon.

In May 2024, the U.S. Army awarded Smart Shooter a $13 million contract to bring the SMASH 2000L to frontline troops under the “Contact Transformation” program, which is the Army’s way of saying “skip the paperwork and get it into the hands of soldiers now.”

The 82nd Airborne Division and 1st Cavalry Division have received SMASH systems as well as other handheld counter-drone equipment.

squad shield

Giving individual soldiers better tools is one thing. Providing teams with a comprehensive defensive bubble is another.

This is exactly what the Flytrap project wants to build. During the summer of 2025, a joint U.S.-British counter-drone exercise was held in Germany and Poland. Flytrap combined a wearable RF (radio frequency) detector, a “Wingman” system that scans drone signals in real time, a body-worn “Pitbull” jammer, a compact EchoShield radar capable of tracking nano-drone up to 30 kilometers away, SMASH optics on the rifle, and 12-gauge SkyNet shotgun rounds to deploy a five-foot capture net to entangle the drone’s propeller.

Layer all of this together, and you get something close to what every infantryman actually needs: 360-degree awareness of your squad, and multiple ways to kill or disable anything that appears. Use Wingman to detect it. Stuck it with Pitbull. If it keeps appearing, shoot it with SMASH or grab it with web bullets. Prosperity.

There must be light

This is where things start to sound like science fiction. They are not.

Directed energy is moving out of the lab and into the battlefield faster than most people realize. The driver was one of those lovely Benjamins. The Patriot interceptor costs approximately $4 million per launch. Israel’s iron-beam laser system achieved its first confirmed combat intercept during operations in early 2026, costing about $2 per launch. This is not a typo.

For individual soldiers, the interesting part is what happens at the smaller end of the force scale. The Nuburu Lyocon is a rifle-mounted laser dazzler that uses multiple wavelengths of light (green, blue and infrared) to blind a drone’s camera and sensors. It won’t melt the fuselage.

Basically, imagine that the Terminator is deployed by an unpredictable being, and then scary robots are looking for your family, forcing you to toil in a Tesla mine if you’re caught; all you have to do is point your rifle at them and shoot lasers into their stupid robot eyes.

Did we mention again that it can be mounted on a quality Picatinny rail? As of March 2026, prototype trials are underway. Also, anything with robot legs is stupid.

For anyone wondering whether soldiers accidentally or recreationally blind their buddies with these things, the short answer is that modern laser dazzlers are specifically designed not to cause permanent eye damage in humans.

France went one step further and launched CILAS HELMA-LP, a laser rifle based on the AR-15 platform and equipped with a backpack power unit with a total weight of approximately 33 pounds (15 kg). French special operations forces have already experimented with this.

Although maintaining a beam long enough to lock onto a fast-maneuvering drone is still a very real problem, it can be effective against static or slow-moving targets at around 500 meters. Rather than seeing this as a rifleman’s problem, think of it as a sniper’s problem.

The results of the HELMA-P laser hitting the DJI Mavic drone during testing.

Of course, this is where Ukraine finds itself again. Recently, they introduced us to Sunray, a compact, portable laser system that fits in the trunk of a car or the bed of a pickup truck. In field tests, it tracked and burned the fuselage of a small drone within seconds, causing the drone to become disabled in mid-air.

Observers described the engagement as “invisible lightning,” with no sound, no muzzle flash, and no visible beam.

Brave1 also supports SlimBeam, a 50kg 1.5kW laser turret that can kill a drone from 800 meters away or blind its optics from 2km away. Deployable as a two-person team. Battery powered operation is thirty minutes and could be used on today’s front lines.

adoption of infantry

All of which is enough to make one wonder what someone who has actually backpacked up a mountain would say about the new device.

“I like the idea, but unless it weighs like a flashlight and requires AA batteries, I don’t know how much more crap you can pile on a single warrior,” lamented GWOT senior Spc. Stuart Drew, 10th Mountain Division.

Solemnly, he was not wrong. Each new capability added to a soldier adds another pound to a frame that already carries 80 to 120 soldiers. The best technology in the world is worthless if the carrier smokes it out of use.

This is precisely why the most promising systems in this field are those that add almost nothing. Horoshok ammunition weighs the same as the ammunition already weighs. SMASH optics replace existing sights and can run for days on a single charge.

The Pitbull Jammer weighs less than three pounds and clips onto a plate holder. Engineers, whether in Kiev, Tel Aviv or Picatinny Arsenal, seem to have gotten the message: if it doesn’t fit into a kit that’s already too heavy, then it doesn’t fit.

Whether you’re ready or not, the era of drone warfare is several years away. It won’t go away. However, do you think there’s nothing standing between you and a $500 quadcopter with grenades? That part is outdated.

Stay relaxed until the next descent.

Don’t miss the best we are strong

• M72 LAW: reinforced infantry tube
• The Mk-19 grenade launcher and how it helped shape the war on terror
• Why traditional jungle warfare training needs an upgrade in 2026