Coyote

The U.S. Army’s primary expendable kinetic counter-drone interceptor — jet-turbine powered, paired with KuRFS radar, and now deploying aboard Navy destroyers.

Overview

The Raytheon Coyote is an expendable, tube-launched interceptor purpose-built to destroy Group I and II unmanned aircraft systems at ranges of 10–15 km. It forms the kinetic layer of the Low, Slow, Small-Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System (LIDS), fusing a Ku-band radar, the Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control (FAAD C2) network, and a two- or four-round launcher into a mobile or palletized air-defense point. The interceptor itself is a rocket-boosted, turbine-sustained airframe with an RF seeker and a compact fragmentation warhead, optimizing a cost-exchange ratio that the Army sought after watching cheap Shahed-class drones overwhelm legacy SAMs. The Coyote has been the Army’s go-to counter-drone weapon in CENTCOM since 2019 and has now migrated to the U.S. Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, while Qatar and the UAE have ordered the system.

Development

The Coyote’s roots trace to Advanced Ceramic Research (ACR) in Tucson, Arizona, which flew the base airframe in 2007 under Office of Naval Research small-business contracts. NOAA later adopted the platform for hurricane reconnaissance, deploying it operationally in September 2014. After ACR passed through BAE Systems and Sensintel, Raytheon acquired Sensintel in 2015 and folded the Coyote into its missile-and-defense portfolio, according to Wikipedia and Designation-Systems. The Army’s counter-drone requirement then accelerated the design: the propeller-driven Block 1B, paired with a Raytheon KuRFS radar and called “Howler,” achieved an initial operational capability in June 2019, barely 17 months after development started. The jet-turbine Block 2 followed to extend speed and range against larger Group II threats and was cleared for international sales in March 2020.

The surge of drone attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East after October 2023 precipitated a series of urgent production buys. The Army obligated $75 million for 600 Block 2C interceptors in January 2024 and added a $197 million follow-on contract in September 2024, DefenseScoop and Stars and Stripes reported. That episodic buying was institutionalized in September 2025, when the Pentagon awarded Raytheon a single $5.04 billion umbrella contract for Coyote (kinetic and non-kinetic variants) and KuRFS radars through September 2033, anchoring the architecture for a decade, as detailed by Army Recognition.

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