Anduril Bolt-M
Anduril's man-portable VTOL loitering munition — AI-guided, returnable if no strike, and the U.S. Marine Corps' first squad-level autonomous organic precision fires system, ordered under the $249M OPF-L program.
A man-portable, VTOL autonomous loitering munition built by Anduril Industries — designed to give squad-level warfighters AI-guided organic precision fires with a returnable airframe, fielded by the U.S. Marine Corps under the OPF-L program and entering operational service in mid-2026.
Overview
The Bolt-M is a battery-powered quadcopter loitering munition developed by Anduril Industries that fuses machine-vision autonomous guidance with a modular, operator-swappable warhead architecture. Unlike improvised first-person-view (FPV) strike drones, Bolt-M flies, tracks, and engages targets under AI supervision, requiring the operator only to authorize four simplified decisions — where to look, what to follow, how to engage, and when to strike. If no lawful target is confirmed, the vehicle can be recalled and stowed for reuse. Built from the ground up for producibility, Bolt-M occupies a deliberate cost band between expendable commercial FPV drones and high-end anti-armor loitering munitions, positioning it as an "affordable attritable" for the squad fight.
Development
A small Anduril engineering team conceived Bolt in 2023 to address a specific battlefield problem: giving non-specialist infantry a reliable loitering capability without requiring "professional-racing-level FPV operators," according to Dan Leighton, Anduril's GM for Precision Engagement Systems, in an interview with TWZ. The system was publicly unveiled in October 2024 alongside the base Bolt ISR variant and the first USMC Organic Precision Fires–Light (OPF-L) evaluation contract award, as reported by DefenseScoop.
In the April 2024 OPF-L down-select, Anduril received $6.4 million — the smallest of three initial awards, compared to AeroVironment's $8.9 million for Switchblade 300 Block 20 and Teledyne FLIR's $12 million for Rogue 1 — under the program's $249 million indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity ceiling, per Inside Unmanned Systems. Anduril delivered more than 250 Bolt-M systems to the Marine Corps in December 2024 for operational evaluation. After 13 months of testing at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, the Marine Corps awarded Anduril a $23.9 million production follow-on in January 2026 for over 600 systems to be delivered between February 2026 and April 2027, as detailed by Army Recognition. An additional undisclosed customer received more than 300 systems within five months of its own contract award, TWZ confirmed with Anduril.
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