Category: General

Why ARCYN’s Configurable Projectiles Change the Counter-Drone Equation

Most counter-drone conversations start with detection, targeting, autonomy, or electronic warfare. Those are all critical pieces of the problem, but they do not answer the question that eventually comes for every commander, base security team, or infrastructure operator: what are we actually going to fire?

That question is becoming harder to ignore. Small unmanned aircraft are cheap, numerous, adaptable, and increasingly difficult to defeat with a single layer of defense. They can be launched in groups, modified quickly, and used in ways that force defenders into costly responses. In too many cases, the economics favor the attacker. A relatively inexpensive drone can force the defender to expend a munition that is far more expensive, more difficult to replace, and more burdensome to move, store, and maintain.

Traditional military munitions are powerful for good reason. They were designed for serious military effects against serious military targets. But they also carry a long operational tail. Many involve energetic materials, including propellants and high explosives, fuzes, complex warheads, hazard classifications, compatibility rules, restrictive rules of engagement, specialized packaging, inspection cycles, security requirements, certified transportation, shelf-life management, disposal, and demilitarization.

The sticker price of a munition is only part of the real cost. The rest shows up in depots, shipping paperwork, explosive safety arcs, storage limits, handling procedures, trained personnel, restricted transport routes, and long-term lifecycle management. For major combat systems, that complexity may be unavoidable. For routine counter-drone defense, especially against small and inexpensive threats, it creates a bad exchange ratio.

ARCYN Defense is approaching the problem differently with Iron Rain™, a new class of kinetic counter-UAS system.

The design logic is straightforward: put the energy in the flywheel, not inside the cartridge’s chemical propellant.

ARCYN’s patent-pending rifled dual-flywheel architecture is built to impart extreme kinetic energy at launch. That allows the projectile itself to remain mechanically simpler, materially configurable, and mission-specific. Instead of designing every round around chemical energy, Iron Rain uses the launch system to create the speed, stability, and kinetic effect needed to defeat aerial threats.

That is a major distinction. A projectile that does not carry chemical propellant, explosive filler, a shell charge, or a complex warhead is not the same logistical object as a rocket, missile, or explosive round. In contrast, it does not create the same energetic-material burden that drives so much of the weight, volume, packaging complexity, transportation restrictions, storage requirements, and lifecycle management associated with traditional munitions.

Compared to traditional bullets and explosive acceleration, Iron Rain’s projectile can reach hypersonic speeds due to a longer acceleration time.

The flywheel system is the competitive advantage that makes this possible. Simple projectiles are only valuable if they can be launched with the velocity, repeatability, spin, and control required for real-world engagements. ARCYN’s rifled dual-flywheel design is intended to deliver that launch energy externally while supporting a family of projectile types that can be matched to the target, terrain, altitude, range, and collateral-risk environment.

This is where configurable kinetic effects become important.

Rubber projectiles are suited for dense urban environments, public venues, airports, critical infrastructure, and other areas where people and property may be below the engagement zone. They are designed for shorter-range engagements and, due to the hypersonic properties of the design, can break apart in flight, reducing collateral risk on the ground after the intercept.

Aluminum provides a lighter projectile option where speed, volume, a more controlled kinetic profile, and limited range are priorities. In some scenarios, operators may not need the mass of steel or tungsten. Aluminum gives the system another way to balance velocity, safety envelope, cost, and effective range.

Steel is the practical workhorse. It is durable, cost-effective, widely understood, and capable of delivering stronger kinetic performance across a broad range of common drone threats. For bases, ports, airfields, border zones, and fixed-site defense, steel can provide a balanced mid-range option for repeated engagements.

Tungsten sits at the high-density, armor-piercing, high-energy end of the family. Its mass and energy retention make it better suited for longer-range, higher-altitude, faster-moving, or more demanding targets. At the upper end of the velocity envelope, tungsten supports extended ballistic engagement profiles where distance, stability, and retained kinetic energy are the priority.

Range is not a single number. It is shaped by projectile material, mass, geometry, spin, launch velocity, atmospheric conditions, target altitude, target speed, and the safety envelope around the engagement. A rubber projectile over a crowded city should not behave like a tungsten projectile launched across open battlespace. The munition should fit the mission, not the other way around.

That flexibility is central to Iron Rain. A drone over a stadium, a drone approaching a forward operating base, a drone near a port, and a drone moving toward critical energy infrastructure all present different risks. Each may call for a different projectile, different engagement distance, and different tolerance for debris or overtravel. A configurable projectile architecture gives operators more choices instead of forcing them into a single effect.

The broader defense problem is not just that drones are small and cheap. It is that the systems used to defeat them must be effective and sustainable under pressure. A counter-UAS platform that works once is not useful. A platform that can engage repeatedly without draining missile stocks, expanding explosive storage burdens, or creating a transportation and demilitarization problem is far more valuable.

Traditional munitions will continue to play a vital role. Some targets require explosive effects, guidance packages, specialized warheads, or other advanced capabilities. But the counter-drone fight also needs a physical defeat layer that is faster to reload, easier to scale, less expensive per defeat, and better suited for large numbers of low-cost aerial threats.

That is the role ARCYN is building toward.

Iron Rain pairs a high-velocity kinetic launch system with configurable projectiles that can be adapted to the environment and the target. The result is a different way to think about air defense: less dependence on complex energetic munitions, deeper magazines, lower logistics burden, and a better cost curve against one of the most scalable threats on the modern battlefield.

Originally posted in Modern War Institute at West Point on June 23, 2026

By Lieutenant General Eric Wesley (USA, Ret) 

Every generation of military strategists produces its share of prophets, men and women convinced they have finally witnessed the weapon that will end the age-old calculus of land warfare. After the trenches of the Somme, it was the machine gun. After the Russia-Ukraine War, it is the drone. Today, a chorus of defense commentators, Silicon Valley evangelists, and think tank scholars are converging on a consensus: Aerial drones will define the next century of conflict. They are wrong—or rather, they are asking the wrong question entirely.

The right question is not What can drones do? It is What can drones not do? And the answer to that question is both ancient and decisive: Drones cannot seize ground. They cannot hold it. They cannot compel a population to submit. They cannot plant a flag on a hilltop and mean it.

The Ukrainian Test Case

Consider Ukraine today. The conflict there has become the world’s most intensive laboratory for drone warfare in history. Drones hunt tanks in the open. Loitering munitions strike artillery kilometers behind the line. Commercial quadcopters drop grenades into trenches with terrifying accuracy. Both sides have deployed drones at a scale and sophistication that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. And yet, the front line only moves in increments measured in hundreds of meters per month.

Why? Because after every drone strike, after every armored column destroyed from above, someone still has to walk across that field. Someone still has to occupy the tree line, clear the basement, and stand in the rubble and say: This is ours now. The drone cannot do that. It likely never will.

The war in Ukraine has not produced a decisive outcome precisely because airpower—drone or otherwise—is a tool of attrition, not decision. It degrades. It disrupts. It delays. Indeed, it kills. But the Clausewitzian logic of war remains stubbornly intact: To compel the will of an intransigent opponent, you must ultimately confront him on the ground, in the physical space he values, and take it from him.

Drones have made maneuver more costly. They have not made it less necessary. That distinction is everything.

The Machine Gun’s Lesson

We have been here before. In August 1914, the armies of Europe marched into a world that had been quietly transformed by the machine gun and industrial artillery. Tacticians who had spent careers studying Napoleonic maneuver discovered that open-field infantry assaults against interlocking fields of fire were simply suicidal. The Western Front ground to a halt. Some observers—understandably, watching the carnage—concluded that offensive ground warfare was finished. Trench warfare, they argued, was the future.

They were wrong. The machine gun was not the future. It was the problem. And within four years, British engineers had built a lumbering, underpowered, mechanically unreliable iron box on tracks that could cross no-man’s-land and suppress a machine gun nest from close range. The tank did not eliminate the problem of the machine gun. It solved it well enough to restore what the machine gun had stolen: the ability to move, to exploit, to break through and pour into the enemy’s rear. Maneuver returned. Decisive outcomes became possible again.

The drone is analogous to the World War I machine gun. It has dramatically raised the cost of movement in the open. It has forced infantry to dig deeper, disperse further, and move only at night or under electronic concealment. It has made the tank—and indeed every surface platform—newly vulnerable in ways that demand urgent solutions. But it has not repealed the principles of war validated over centuries. It has not invented a new theory of victory. It has created a new problem for maneuver forces to solve.

What Comes Next

The answer will not come from more drones. It will come from whatever restores the ability to maneuver under drone threat—just as the tank restored maneuver under machine gun threat. That may be electronic warfare systems—and the agile management of them—that can blind and jam swarms. It may be directed-energy weapons that can cheaply defeat mass drone attacks. It may be more innovative, affordable counterdrone technologies that exploit the vulnerabilities of light aircraft. It may be autonomous ground systems that can move forward without risking human lives, drawing drone attention and depleting enemy munitions before human forces exploit the gap. It is certainly some combination we have not yet fielded at scale.

What it will not be is the drone itself. History is not kind to the school of thought that mistakes the current dominant problem for a permanent feature of warfare. The machine gun theorists were not ignorant men—they were simply extrapolating from what they saw rather than from what war requires. What war requires has not changed since Thucydides first recorded it as a fact of political life: the capacity to take and hold what your enemy values, and to do so at a cost he finds unsustainable.

Until a weapons system can do that from the sky—until a drone can knock on a door, secure a city block, and look a population in the eye—the boots will have to follow. The drone is a remarkable and lethal tool. But remarkable and lethal tools have always been the prelude to the next problem, not the solution to the last one. The visionaries who understand that will win the next war. The ones who don’t will be building drone factories while their enemy figures out how to own the ground beneath them.

Lieutenant General Eric Wesley (USA, Ret) is the former director of the Futures and Concepts Center and deputy commander of Army Futures Command. He currently serves on a number of boards for companies developing drones and counterdrone technology, advanced nuclear power, combat vehicles, and next generation artificial intelligence. He serves as a senior advisor to ARCYN Defense, a counterdrone company.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense

Originally posted in The Geopolitical Economist. March 26, 2026.

Cheap, mass-produced drones are forcing the launch of multi-million-dollar interceptors and exposing a growing vulnerability in modern air defense: missile inventories can be exhausted faster than they can be replaced.

A $50,000 drone is forcing the United States to fire $4 million missiles.

That is not a sustainable way to fight a war.

Across the Middle East and beyond, inexpensive drones are exposing a critical weakness in modern air defense: missile inventories can be drained faster than they can be replaced.

Recent Iranian strikes across the Gulf illustrate the emerging dynamic. Over the course of the campaign, Iran launched well over a thousand drones and hundreds of missiles against U.S. and allied targets across the region. Many of these systems were intercepted by layered air defenses. Others penetrated those defenses and struck military installations, infrastructure, and areas near diplomatic facilities, including locations near the U.S. consulate in Dubai.

Some of the most consequential impacts targeted the sensors and communications infrastructure that underpin the region’s missile defense architecture. One strike damaged the AN/FPS-132 early-warning radar at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, one of the most important long-range missile warning sensors supporting U.S. operations in the region. A single drone took out a $1.1-billion-dollar radar.

Another attack appears to have knocked out an AN/TPY-2 radar associated with a U.S. THAAD missile defense battery at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. Systems of this type represent some of the most advanced radar platforms deployed by the United States and its partners and typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars to field. Iranian strikes also damaged facilities and satellite communications assets at the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

The aircraft responsible for many of these attacks are variants of the Shahed-136, a loitering munition designed for large-scale production. Their design emphasizes affordability and scale rather than technological sophistication, and most estimates place their cost somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 per aircraft.

The systems used to stop them exist in an entirely different economic category. U.S. and allied forces rely heavily on the PAC-3 Patriot interceptor to defeat incoming drones and missiles, and each interceptor costs roughly $4 million. When an inexpensive drone compels the launch of a missile worth several million dollars, the defender is forced into a deeply unfavorable exchange.

Cost is only part of the problem. The deeper issue is volume. Drone warfare favors scale, allowing attackers to launch large numbers of inexpensive aircraft simultaneously.

Air defense networks must engage each incoming threat, forcing defenders to expend interceptors repeatedly during sustained attacks.

Every interceptor fired reduces the number available for other threats, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and manned aircraft. The result is a strategic dynamic that military planners increasingly describe as magazine warfare.

The concept is not entirely new. During the Second World War, Allied air planners recognized that sustained bombing campaigns could overwhelm German air defenses not only by destroying targets, but by exhausting interceptor aircraft, pilots, and anti-aircraft ammunition. What is different today is the scale at which relatively inexpensive unmanned systems can be produced and deployed.

In magazine warfare, the objective is not necessarily to destroy the defender’s infrastructure immediately. Instead, the goal is to drain the defender’s ammunition inventory faster than it can be replenished. Missile inventories are finite, and production lines for advanced interceptors move slowly. Manufacturing complex missile systems often takes months or years, particularly when specialized components and constrained supply chains are involved.

Cheap drones, by contrast, can be produced in very large numbers. When an attacker can manufacture thousands of inexpensive aircraft while the defender relies on a limited stock of expensive interceptors, the balance of attrition begins to shift. Over time, the contest becomes less about the performance of individual weapons systems and more about production capacity, cost efficiency, and inventory depth.

In that environment, inexpensive drones become tools of attrition, designed to drive the expenditure of far more valuable defensive systems. Each launch forces a tradeoff between preserving limited interceptor inventory and accepting greater operational risk.

The strategic implications are severe. If defenders exhaust their interceptors during sustained drone attacks, the remaining missile defenses may no longer be available to counter more advanced threats. Once those magazines begin to empty, the balance of air power can shift rapidly in favor of the attacker.

The rise of inexpensive, mass-produced drones is therefore reshaping the economics of air defense. The contest is no longer defined solely by the sophistication of individual weapons systems, but by the broader relationship between production capacity, cost, and inventory.

Modern air defense was built around the assumption that advanced weapons would be relatively scarce. Drone warfare is overturning that assumption.

The question is no longer whose missiles are better.

It is whose defenses fail first when the missiles run out.

Dr. Aaron Poynton is an entrepreneur and national security strategist focused on artificial intelligence and emerging defense technologies. He serves as CEO of Arcyn Defense, a company developing next-generation counter-drone systems. He is also Executive Director of the American Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASFAI). Views expressed are his own.

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