AUSA 2026 Floor Notes: Cheap Drones, Layered Defences, and Cameras That Never Blink

The AUSA Annual Meeting and Exposition ran from 12 to 14 October 2026 in Washington, DC, with more than 700 exhibitors (Shephard). We walked the floor looking at one thing: small drones, and the systems built to find and stop them. These are our notes and photos. Every figure below comes from a vendor's own display or website, and none of them has been independently verified.

The attack side: cheap, quiet, and reusable

One yellow stand showed a full family of strike and support drones. These included the MARY reusable UAV, pitched "for precision multi-drop missions" and paired on screen with a munition called Lumet, an aerial repeater for pushing control range beyond the horizon, and caged quads built to survive collisions. One screen claimed "80%+ engagement probability" from autonomous terminal guidance that holds the locked target "even after communication is lost." We could not confirm the maker behind the stand, so we name the products as they were displayed.

The spec tablets were frank. The Blink Classic 10" FPV listed a 1 kg payload over 43 km or 3 kg over 25 km, a 90 km/h cruise speed and 130 km/h maximum, and a 15-minute deployment time. The Blink Mini 5" listed 0.5 kg over 3 km, 80 km/h maximum and up to 12 minutes in the air. The 5-inch was offered with analog or fibre-optic control, and both came in day, night and dual-sensor versions.

Fibre on a spec sheet as a checkbox is the detail that matters most for defenders. A drone flown down a fibre radiates no control link. RF direction-finding has nothing to hear, and jamming has nothing to jam. Fibre-guided FPVs are now made by many manufacturers (Rubryka), and the format has clearly crossed the Atlantic.

Built for swarms, and built to be silent

The exhibitor list read like a catalogue of the threat. Two classes matter most for anyone defending a weapon station or a site against swarms: cheap FPV strike drones and small loitering munitions.

Red Cat (booth 353) offers its FANG line of American-made FPVs, sold as "low cost, reusable, retrievable." There are three airframes. The 10-inch F10-P carries up to 2.0 kg, flies 10 km with payload or 15 km without, and the larger two reach 97 mph (Red Cat). XTEND (booth 7207) builds FPV attack-drone kits for US special operations that can fly over fibre optic or hardened radio links (Airforce Technology). Drones this cheap are bought by the thousand, which is what turns a single threat into a swarm.

Silence is now a selling point. The quietest threat on the list came from AeroVironment (booth 7515). Its Switchblade 300 is an electric, tube-launched loitering munition, and silence is in its DNA: it grew out of an Army programme called SOAR, short for Silent Operating Aerial Reconnaissance, which asked for a backpackable drone with a very low acoustic signature (Designation Systems). There is no engine to hear, only a small electric motor. AeroVironment says the Switchblade's small size and low acoustic signature make it hard to detect or track, even at close range (AeroVironment product catalogue). A drone you cannot hear arrives before anyone looks up.

Other small loitering munitions on the exhibitor list included UVision's Hero-30 (booth 1167), SpearUAV's tube-launched Viper (booth 1167), Rafael's Spike Firefly (booth 3225) and Anduril's Bolt-M (booth 151) (AUSA exhibitor list).

A silent electric drone defeats the ear, and acoustic sensors with it. On a fibre or flying autonomously, it defeats the radio receiver too.

The defence side: everything on one mast

Counter-UAS stands converged on a single picture: stack every sensor and effector on one mast or one vehicle, and sell the software that ties them together.

Twenty-Six Defense showed a tan vehicle-mounted mast topped with a radar panel and several EO/IR turrets, with interceptor drones on the plinth in front. It is a clear statement that detection and defeat now ship as one unit.

Kongsberg showed its Protector remote weapon station dressed for counter-UAS, with optical sights and sensor panels on the turret. Germany already fields a Protector-based counter-drone system. At last year's AUSA, Kongsberg pitched adding counter-UAS to the US Army's existing CROWS stations through software and fire control, not new hardware (European Security & Defence).

Honeywell Aerospace ran looping displays under the line "Counter-UAS: Detect, deter, and defeat. Any platform. Any domain. Anywhere." The messages that followed were "stationary and mobile C-UAS defense", "360° warfighter awareness" and "modular, open architecture". The same kiosk featured the Honeywell 360 Display, a head-worn visor that stitches outside camera feeds into one view for vehicle crews and pilots (Honeywell).

Electronic warfare had not gone away. Unwave, a Ukrainian EW maker, took part in the US Drone Dominance trials at Fort Carson (Militarnyi). That sums up the contest on the floor: EW still works against the large population of radio-controlled drones. It does nothing against the growing share on a fibre.

Drone-in-a-box was there too: a Skydio X10 sat on its dock, which shelters and charges the drone and launches it in about 20 seconds without a pilot on site (UAV Coach). Docked drones are becoming the eyes that go out and confirm what a fixed sensor cued.

Electro-optics: two families

Radar solutions were on show, but we think electro-optical sensing has to carry more of the load against small drones. The floor showed two prominent families. The first is cued trackers: PTZ cameras with narrow fields of view that slew onto a target and follow it. They depend on a neighbouring sensor or C2 system to tell them roughly where to look. The second is wide-area search, which watches a whole sector with no cue. It comes in two forms. Scanning systems sweep a high-quality camera with a cooled detector across the horizon. Staring systems use an array of uncooled cameras that watch every direction at once. HGH showed both forms.

Thermal that watches the whole horizon

HGH Infrared Systems showed two panoramic thermal heads. The Spynel-X 3500 is a scanning head. Its poster lists a 360° by 20° field of view, a 23,000 × 1,280-pixel panorama from a megapixel MWIR detector, a spatial resolution of 0.30 mrad, and a 2 Hz scan rate. It weighs under 40 kg. HGH's own chart puts small-drone detection at the short end of its range bars, with aircraft much further out.

The Spynel-F is a staring head: 180° horizontal, 1.5 megapixels, 30 Hz video, digitally stabilised, 3 kg. The tablet at the stand listed a 45° vertical field of view. HGH's product page says 40°, and an earlier HGH page gave 10 Hz rather than 30 Hz (HGH, Spynel-F; HGH, Euronaval 2024 release). It is pitched for vehicles and uncrewed surface vessels. HGH says two units make a full 360° ring.

What we take away

1. Purpose-built robotic ground soldiers almost vanished, even at a US Army exhibition. The uncrewed ground vehicles on show were mostly converted trucks, such as Humvee, Silverado and Oshkosh (Shephard), and they drew little attention. The Army's focus has clearly shifted to drones.
2. Drones were everywhere, and they will come in swarms. They came in every size, operating range and payload. Common to all: they are cheap, easy to operate, and work day and night in almost any weather. Some are fully autonomous, with a small radar cross-section; others are fibre-optic controlled, which makes them RF-silent. None were operating on the exhibition floor.
3. The defenders know they are exposed, and that drones will target them first. Makers of remote weapon stations and protectors of critical sites openly acknowledge that their systems are vulnerable to drone attack. To protect the platform itself, not only the site, they are loading their systems with radars, electro-optical sensors and, in some cases, acoustic sensors.
4. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but one thing doesn't change. A drone cannot hide its body or its thermal signature. Motors, batteries and electronics run hot. A drone that has flown for hours carrying a medium-size warhead is even harder to conceal.

Bottom line: choose a C-UAS that protects your forces 24/7 in the field against low- or high-flying swarms of small, silent, autonomous drones with a small radar cross-section. Today, the one signature these drones cannot hide is thermal.

Independent commentary by GOTEAM. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any organisation named above. Figures are as shown on vendor displays or published by their sources and have not been independently verified. Photos taken by GOTEAM on the public show floor.