APKWS

The cheapest precision munition in the arsenal — APKWS is not a missile but a guidance kit that clips into the middle of an ordinary 70mm rocket and turns it into a laser-guided weapon for a fraction of a Hellfire's price. That simple trick has made it the workhorse of the counter-drone cost war: it is the round inside L3Harris's VAMPIRE downing Shaheds over Ukraine, the weapon F-16s and F-15s fire to swat Houthi drones out of the Red Sea, and the ordnance hanging under the OA-1K and the Apache. At roughly $25,000 a shot against $20,000 drones, it is the munition that finally put a precision kill within budget — and BAE has built more than 100,000 of them.

Overview

APKWS (the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, designated AGR-20 on fixed-wing aircraft and AGR-19 on helicopters) is a BAE Systems laser-guidance kit — a mid-body guidance section that installs between the motor and warhead of a standard unguided Hydra 70 rocket, converting it into a semi-active laser-guided precision munition. It exists to fill the gap between the cheap, inaccurate unguided rocket and the expensive Hellfire missile: same rocket, same launcher, precision guidance, at roughly a sixth of a Hellfire's cost. Its guidance is DASALS — a Distributed Aperture Semi-Active Laser Seeker with optics on four flip-out wings that home on a target illuminated by an external designator. Fielded in 2012 and combat-proven in Afghanistan that April, APKWS became ubiquitous across US helicopters and jets — but its defining second act is counter-drone warfare: the ground-launched VAMPIRE kit uses it to kill Shaheds in Ukraine, and the air-to-air AGR-20F "FALCO" variant (a software-and-fuze upgrade) turned F-16s, F-15Es and A-10s into cheap drone-hunters over the Red Sea from 2024. The economics are the whole story: at ~$25,000 a shot — the guidance section alone runs $15,000–20,000 — APKWS lets a defender trade roughly one-for-one against a $20,000 Shahed instead of burning a million-dollar air-to-air missile, and it does so from magazines forty-plus rounds deep. BAE delivered its 100,000th kit in February 2026 and holds a $1.7 billion order for tens of thousands more.

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