UK buys Altius-M loitering munitions for Ukraine

The British Government has procured an unspecified quantity of Altius-600M and Altius-700M loitering munitions from Anduril UK for Ukraine, according to a 6th March announcement on the British MoD’s website. 

The contract is valued at nearly £30 million (€35.7 million) and financed by the International Fund for Ukraine (IFU), which is administered by a panel consisting of the UK, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Lithuania. The IFU has received funding from the panel and other states, including Germany, Australia, and Iceland and provided or pledged over £1.3 billion (€1.54 billion) since 2023. 

The drones will be delivered to Ukraine in the coming months, the announcement states. “We are determined to achieve a secure, lasting peace in Ukraine, which means putting Ukraine in the strongest possible position to prevent any return to Russian aggression,” the UK’s Defence Secretary John Healey said. 

The work on the procurement with Anduril was carried out by DE&S, the procurement arm of the British MoD. “Our focus on developing and deploying technology where and when it’s needed is at the core of everything we do – from the rapid delivery of Altius to Ukraine to the expansion of our presence here in the UK,” Dr Rich Drake, managing director of Anduril UK said. 

Production for the Altius-700M and other variants is currently focused in Atlanta, Georgia, in a facility that Anduril has invested more than $60 million to expand to meet the production demand for the Altius family. This is not the first delivery of Anduril’s products to Ukraine. “Altius attack drones have already taken out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Russian targets, including critical hardware protected by EW [electronic warfare] systems that would have been hard to defeat any other way,” Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder said on X.com on the 6th March. 

EW is an effective tool for degrading the control and video feeds of drones that use wireless radio frequencies. It can distort an operator’s picture when using a loitering munition, degrade the command link so that the drone does not or will not fly properly, and prevent the drone from understanding where it is, which will typically lead to a loss of the platform. Overall, the weakness targeted by EW is the operator’s ability to control the drone, it is just done through several different means. 

The Altius-M munitions are understood to use artificial intelligence for a portion of their navigation and target detection, which works by understanding what the drone can sense and making a decision there and then. This makes it resilient to EW as there is no need for the drone to supply that information back to the operator – it can simply make the decision itself within its established programming. 

Some industry sources have indicated that the UK could be the location of the next Anduril hyperscale factory. The company is building Arsenal-1 in Ohio, with the goal of reinvigorating US national defence production by producing autonomous systems and missiles at scale. 

Anduril UK was set up in 2019 to bring the company’s product portfolio to the UK; the company’s staff has doubled in size approximately every 18 months since opening, which includes a number of software engineers. 

Tech profile: Altius-M

The Altius-600M and 700M are based on the Altius-600 drones shown here. The Altius-700M carries a lethal payload that is similar in weight to a Hellfire missile. Its range appears to be much greater than other munitions in its class. Credit: Anduril

Altius is a product family from Anduril consisting of conventional drones designed for reconnaissance and surveillance, designated Altius-600 and -700. The Altius-600M and 700M are loitering munitions based on those designs. They are differentiated by their size and the payload that they can carry. The Altius 700M can carry a payload up to 14.9 kg, it has a loiter time of 75 minutes, and a range of 160 km which Anduril describes as best in class for this type of munition. Full technical details of most loitering munitions are not made publicly available. However, the HX-2 from Helsing is reported to have a range of 100 km, and the Russian Lancet-3M can reach up to at least 80 km. 

The Altius-600M is smaller than the 700M, and the drone variant (Altius-600) has a loiter time in excess of four hours. They can be fitted with different payloads and sensors to enable missions like intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as SIGINT. The company also states that the Altius munitions are designed for swarm operations with a high degree of autonomy allowing the user to deploy them with centralised control whilst they also conduct missions independently of each other. As covered in past articles on Calibre, this concept is similarly applied in the Dominion-X system developed and announced by Elbit Systems. 

Calibre comment

Loitering munitions have clearly been identified by Ukraine’s western partners as a vital tool that can be used to give its armed forces an effective precision strike capability. There are many challenges on the Ukrainian frontline, but one of them that tends to define a lot of combat is the dispersion of forces and equipment. As well as a particularly deep front with most elements echeloned a long way from the fighting. This makes the use of conventional artillery munitions like howitzers and mortars challenging as it is difficult to hit a small, singular target without guidance. Loitering munitions, however, provide the type of effector that can be precisely flown to and engage a small target whilst allowing the operator to remain out of reach.