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.

Development

APKWS began as a General Dynamics concept — a low-cost laser seeker and flip-out guidance wings for the Hydra 70 — and matured as APKWS II under BAE Systems, entering service in 2012 after initial operational test and evaluation, per Army Technology. Its first combat use came in Afghanistan in April 2012 from rotary-wing platforms. The US Navy funded expansion to fixed-wing aircraft (A-10, AV-8B) in 2011, the USAF put it on F-16s and A-10s operationally in 2016, and an air-to-air capability was demonstrated on an F-16 in 2019 — the seed of the counter-drone role. The counter-drone explosion came in 2024–2026: USAF F-16s used the air-to-air AGR-20F FALCO to make their first combat drone intercepts over the Red Sea in 2024 against Houthi one-way attack drones, and integration spread fast — F-15Es (up to 42 rockets), A-10s returning from CENTCOM with UAS kill markings, USMC F/A-18s, and even an MQ-9 as launcher. Ground-launched, the L3Harris VAMPIRE used APKWS to down Shaheds in Ukraine (a filmed night kill near Odesa in August 2025), and a Ukrainian F-16 downed a Russian Shahed with APKWS during a mass strike in February 2026. BAE's production scaled to match: an August 2025 US Navy IDIQ worth up to $1.7 billion (full-rate lots, up to ~55,000 kits), a February 2026 USAF ~$145 million order for a dual-mode air-to-air variant to counter swarms of "as many as 200" drones, and the 100,000th guidance kit delivered on 24 February 2026 from BAE's New Hampshire and Texas lines, per The Defense Post.

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