ROBNEWS
Mistral, an Ondas subsidiary, now holds more than $240M in orders under a $982M multi year Army contract for loitering munitions, the kamikaze style strike drones reshaping modern battlefields.
The US Army is filling out a multi-year contract for loitering munitions, the kamikaze-style drones that find, circle, and strike ground targets, and a small American supplier, Mistral, just collected another $50 million order to extend its run.
Mistral Inc., the U.S. defense prime contractor that Ondas bought specifically to climb into this category, has now won more than $240 million in task orders under the Army's Lethal Unmanned Systems (LUS) program, per the Ondas corporate press release and the parallel Mistral/Uvision announcement distributed via PR Newswire. The latest order, disclosed on August 5, adds HERO 120 systems and ancillary equipment to a production line already in motion. First-batch deliveries under the initial $190.8 million order begin in the third quarter of 2026, per Military Embedded Systems.
The LUS program runs under a $982 million multi-year IDIQ contract, an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicle the Pentagon uses when it knows it will keep buying a category but cannot yet fix yearly quantities. The Army obligates money in pieces, through individual task orders, and suppliers compete for each slice. Filling that vehicle quickly, with multiple qualified vendors, is how the service is constructing a kamikaze-drone supplier bench: a small set of firms it can lean on when demand spikes.
Mistral sits inside Ondas's defense stack alongside DZYNE and Rotron, units that give the parent a portfolio of autonomous and precision-strike technologies. Ondas Chairman and CEO Eric Brock framed the new order as a step "deeper into the precision-strike market," in the company release, the same market Mistral was acquired to access. The HERO 120, made by Uvision and now being domestically manufactured for the U.S. program, is what Mistral is selling. Per the designation-systems.net spec page, the system weighs about 18 kilograms including its canister, flies 60 kilometers on an hour of endurance at speeds between 90 and 260 kilometers per hour, and carries a roughly 4.5 kilogram combined anti-armor and anti-personnel warhead. It is electric, uses GPS preprogramming plus an operator in the loop, and tracks targets with a gimballed electro-optical and infrared camera that auto-tracks day and night.
Cheap, expendable, autonomous strike systems have become a defining weapon of recent conflict, and the U.S. Army is signaling it intends to buy them at scale, not as research curiosities. The LUS program lives inside the Capability Portfolio Executive Mission Autonomy, Precision Strike Reconnaissance Systems portfolio, the bureaucratic address for that shift. Trade coverage treated the latest order as a confirmation of that trajectory rather than an isolated win.
$982 million is a ceiling, not an obligation. Roughly $740 million of headroom remains, and Mistral's $240 million-plus is the leading share, not the whole bench. Loitering munitions also remain a live policy debate because the targeting is autonomous even with a human in the loop, and any expansion of the supplier base carries that controversy. The Ondas release does not address it; the Army program description does not either.
What to watch: whether the remaining IDIQ headroom is met by Mistral alone, by other primes, or by a wider roster of smaller vendors, and whether the Q3 2026 delivery milestone holds. The kamikaze-drone bench is being built in pieces. Mistral just took another one.