In 2024, the Global Drone Market was valued at $25.3 billion. By 2033, it is predicted that the Global Drone Market will see a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 13.4%, reaching a total value of $133.6 billion. The majority of the market will be to support drones used in agriculture, delivery and logistics, real estate, and construction. However, one of the biggest sectors supporting the drone industry, now analyzed separately from the Global Drone Market, is drones for military use.

Since the development of the first modern drone in 1935, drones have dominated military operations. The first drone was the De Havilland DH.82B Queen Bee, developed by the British aircraft manufacturer Fairey Aviation. It was a remote-controlled bomber that could remain airborne for around 5 hours with a payload of 1,000 lbs. Seeing the Queen Bee’s success in attacking German U-boats during WWII, the US soon began developing its own drones.

During the 1990s, General Atomics began developing two drones for the United States Military that would arguably become the most famous drones in history: the Predator and Reaper drones. These drones forever changed how drones are used in military operations. When President George W. Bush authorized the use of the Predator and Reaper during the War in Afghanistan, drones suddenly became household names.

Costing between $40-$30 million per unit, the United States military was eager to continue investing in drone technology that would give them an advantage over adversaries while protecting American lives. In 2023, the Department of Defense dedicated more than $2.6 billion to drone technologies. Many of the drones used in military operations are single-use or kamikaze devices. While such drones will likely continue to be heavily relied upon, the United States is also looking for ways to streamline its drone budget with retrievable drones.

After selling his invention Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion, Palmer Luckey founded Anduril Industries, a defense company focused on unmanned vehicles. In 2024, after only being in the drone industry for seven years, Anduril announced that it had been chosen to develop new drone technology for the US Navy and Air Force. One of the projects Anduril has developed is a retrievable drone called Roadrunner.

As explained on the Anduril website, “Roadrunner is a reusable, vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), operator-supervised Autonomous Air Vehicle (AAV) with twin turbojet engines and modular payload configurations that can support a variety of missions. Roadrunner-M is a high-explosive interceptor variant of Roadrunner built for ground-based air defense, capable of rapidly launching, identifying, intercepting, and destroying a wide variety of aerial threats—or be safely recovered and relaunched at near-zero cost.” Besides being a retrievable drone, Anduril believes there is another fundamental difference between the drones they develop and the kamikaze drones the military has long used.

This difference lies in the emerging advancements in software rather than hardware that will dominate drones of the future. With machine learning, drones can intelligently carry out a wide range of operations, according to Anduril. “The next generation of military technology,” Anduril’s mission states, “will depend less on advances in shipbuilding and aircraft design than on advances in software engineering and computing. Unlike traditional defense contractors who primarily focus on hardware, Anduril’s core system is Lattice OS, an autonomous sensemaking and command & control platform that serves as the core platform for our suite of capabilities.”

With Roadrunner, military forces could have a network of drones that are ready to launch within minutes. These operations can be easily uploaded to the software system, minimizing the number of people needed to operate them. When the mission is done, the Roadrunner drone returns to its Nest to recharge and await its next mission. While in the Nest, the drone’s automated maintenance and transportation hangar, Roadrunner’s software can be endlessly updated. The drone’s computer is constantly learning and evolving.

Anduril estimates that the Roadrunner drone will have a low six-figure price tag, a number that will likely drop as orders increase. Anduril does not think that drones like the Roadrunner will completely replace the costly single-use drones that have become a mainstay for military use. However, lower-priced, retrievable, machine learning drones could be the next frontier in military drone technology.

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