America’s new air-to-air missile is a drone’s worst nightmare

American fighter jets now have a new weapon against enemy drones that promises to change the combat arithmetic of these engagements squarely in Uncle Sam’s favor. The AGR-20 FALCO, also known as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II, is now America’s cheapest air-to-air weapon, making it possible to engage one-way attack drones from fighters, helicopters, surface-based launchers and more without breaking the bank.

New footage released by U.S. Central Command shows it in action against Houthi Drones over the Middle East.

The advent of low-cost one-way or “kamikaze” drones in recent years has presented unique challenges for the U.S. military, which has developed its air defense doctrine and systems around taking down much more expensive fighter jets, bombers, and missiles. Air defense platforms like the Army’s MIM-104 Patriot, the Navy’s AEGIS combat system, and more were all built around using multi-million dollar interceptors to engage multi-million dollar targets.

Over the past few years, the American military has demonstrated that its ship and air-launched missiles can locate, close with, and destroy just about any drone an adversary could launch. However, using these interceptors against one-way attack drones that may cost as little as $50,000 apiece represents a very tough economic pill to swallow, with short-range interceptors like the ship-launched Evolved Sea Sparrow ringing it at roughly $1.5 million each and more capable, longer-ranged missiles like the SM-2 or SM-6 ranging from $2.5 to as much as $4.3 million each.

These surface-based defenses have been brought down in cost by fighter-launched missiles – however their price is still high: America’s primary radar-guided and relatively long-ranged air intercept weapon, the AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile, or AMRAAM, depending on iteration and capability, costs over a million dollars. Its shorter-ranged infrared-guided sibling, the AIM-9 Sidewinder, America’s lowest-cost air-to-air missile, varies in cost, but has a reported replacement rate of around $472,000, making it currently America’s best and lowest-cost option for drone engagements of this type.

This all raises some serious questions about America’s ability to financially withstand prolonged air-defense efforts like the one its currently embroiled in over the Red Sea. We tend to call this comparison of the cost of an intercept versus the cost of the weapon intercepted, the “cost-exchange ratio.”

Because of the complexity of air-to-air intercepts, its generally expected that interceptors will cost roughly twice as much as the drone or missile they bring down (a cost exchange ratio of 2:1). Yet, recent figures out of the Navy’s Red Sea defense suggest Uncle Sam is currently spending somewhere between four and 40 times more than the Houthis to defend these important shipping lanes from drone and missile attacks. From the onset of the Navy’s Red Sea defense through the end of 2024, the Navy had expended about 400 individual munitions to take down Houthi drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. The price of the interceptors ranged from roughly $1.5 million for the cheapest to over $12 million for the most expensive ones.

All told, that shakes out to just shy of $780 million in expended munitions… but the problems extend further than that. Up until recently, the U.S. Navy lacked the ability to reload its warship interceptors at sea, and today, that capability is still rather limited. This means Navy Destroyers and Cruisers need to sail back to friendly ports and take days away from the fight in order to restock their interceptors.

And that’s where the AGR-20 FALCO, also known as the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II (or APKWS II), comes in. Rather than using multi-million-dollar interceptors like the Navy’s SM-6, or even pricy air-to-air missiles like the Sidewinder or AMRAAM, the AGR-20 is effectively a cheap 70mm Hydra unguided rocket married up to the semi-active laser-guidance system out of the Hellfire missile.

Originally designed for use against lightly armored ground targets back in 2008, this system takes an existing 2.75-inch fin-stabilized but unguided rocket and adds a soda can-sized mid-body guidance unit, called the WGU-59/B, behind the warhead but ahead of its existing Mk 66 Mod 4 rocket motor. In order to make sure these weapons still fit in their standard launch tubes, BAE Systems incorporated the guidance sensors into four small, foldable wings, each housing laser-seeker optics that are blended together into a single, wide field of view.

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This combination of systems resulted in an inexpensive weapon that bridged the range and capability gap between the 20mm machine guns commonly found on attack helicopters like the Apache and the longer-ranged but pricier Hellfire missiles. 

In this application, these weapons first entered service for the Marine Corps in 2012, and by 2013, the system recorded its 100th combat launch in Afghanistan without a single reported failure. But things got really interesting in 2021, when BAE systems added a proximity fuse and software upgrade to increase the weapon’s range, making it capable of taking down airborne targets from ranges as far out as 7.5 miles (depending on launch altitude), and closing that distance at speeds as high as Mach 2.9. 

These weapons can carry a variety of warheads ranging from eight to 14 pounds, but the most common 10-pound warhead has a blast radius of roughly 30 feet and a fragmentation debris radius of up to 150 feet, making it perfectly suited for engaging airborne threats line drones and missiles. At about 74 inches long, with a 2.75-inch diameter and a total of weight of just 32 pounds, fighters like the F-16 can carry up to two pods with seven of these guided rockets each, on a single weapon station — which would usually carry just one air-to-air missile. This is a particularly big deal when engaging kamikaze drones or cruise missiles launched in high volumes, as a group of Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles learned defending against Iranian attacks in the Middle East last April. 

Out of 300 weapons launched at Israel on April 13 2024, at least 170 of them were relatively low-cost kamikaze drones and thirty more were subsonic cruise missiles — giving American and British fighters in the region at least 200 targets to engage from the air. After expending all eight air-to-air missiles carried by each Strike Eagle, some even resorted to trying to engage low-and-slow flying drones with the fighter’s onboard 20mm cannon — an extremely dangerous thing to do in the inky darkness of the night sky. There were just too many targets and not enough missiles to go around. 

All told, those six Strike Eagles flew a combined 14 sorties, landing and re-arming in record time to go after more drones as they flew by overhead, with maintainers and tech turning these jets around while air defense systems fired all around them and debris rained from the sky.

Altogether, this heroic effort saw a total of 112 interceptors brought to bear against airborne targets across 14 Strike Eagle sorties. But if these six fighters had each been equipped with, say, four LAU-131A rocket pods instead, each jet could have taken to the sky with a whopping 28 interceptors underwing, allowing the formation to bring an incredible 168 targets down with just one sortie each. 

And while the cost to replace those Sidewinders and AMRAAMs will range from as little as $52 million (if they were all cheap Sidewinders) to as much as $146 million (if they were all pricier AMRAAMs)… the cost of replacing all 168 expended rockets would have been a comparatively tiny $4.2 million. 

You could literally buy an F-35 and two Black Hawk helicopters with what these weapons could have saved in that single engagement alone. 

According to the Air Force, the AGR-20 rings in at just $22-$25,000 per round, meaning you could buy roughly 19 of these interceptors for the cost of a single Sidewinder missile, and as many as 52 for the cost of a single radar-guided AMRAAM. And maybe most importantly, that means these interceptors cost even less than most of the drones or cruise missiles they’d be used to bring down… Iran’s now-infamous Shahed-136 kamikaze drone which’s seen widespread use in the Middle East and Ukraine, costs a reported $50,000 a piece, though a hacker group that gained access to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) e-mail servers found internal documents that suggest a per-drone cost of closer to $375,000. 

That means America’s new AGR-20 interceptors don’t just improve America’s cost-exchange ratio for these engagements, they completely invert it, making it 1:2 in America’s favor at worst, and maybe as much as 1:15 if those e-mails are to be believed.  

And these low-cost interceptors aren’t just much easier to reload than the Navy’s shipborne missiles, the Air Force says they’re even faster to reload than air-to-air missiles are, making it easier to conduct what’s commonly called an integrated combat turn, or ICT, where you re-arm and refuel a fighter while its engines are still running to get it back into the fight as quickly as possible.

The Air Force conducted its first airborne intercept of a drone using these weapons in December of 2019, launched from an F-16 out of the 85Th test and evaluation squadron, cued off of the jet’s AN/AAQ-33 Sniper Advanced Targeting Pod, but as far as the public is aware, these weapons didn’t see their first air-to-air use in combat until this past year over the Red Sea. And as near as I can tell, this is the first footage we’ve ever gotten of these low-cost weapons in use for the air-to-air role. These weapons have already been integrated into a wide variety of American and allied aircraft, including the A-10 Warthog, AH-64 Apache, F/A-18 Hornet, the MH-60 Seahawk, and even SOCOM’s new WWII-style attack plane, the Skyraider II (formerly known as the AT-802 Sky Warden) – and as of just recently, from ground-launchers like the Navy’s new Electronic Advanced Ground Launcher Systems (EAGLS), which carries a four-rocket launcher with an electro-optical infrared sensor turret and its own dedicated radar array.

Of course, as broadly capable as this weapon is, there’s no such thing as a single solution to the growing drone problem, and this program represents just one of seemingly countless programs aimed at bringing down one-way attack drones, including a variety of increasingly powerful directed energy weapons. So, like any weapon system, the real value of these low-cost interceptors only grows when integrated into a broader array of air defense systems and capabilities, with some, of course, costing more than others.

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