AUSA 2025: AV launches new Switchblade for LASSO

Switchblade 400 debuts at the AV booth at AUSA 2025. (Janes/Meredith Roaten)

AV, a company formed by the merger of AeroVironment and BlueHalo, debuted a new loitering munition, Switchblade 400, for the US Army's Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (LASSO).

The army released a request for proposal (RFP) for an unmanned anti-tank weapon for LASSO, over the boreal summer, for which AV submitted its new munition, Brian Young, vice-president loitering munitions systems, told reporters on the sidelines of the Association of the United States Army's (AUSA's) annual conference on 13 October in Washington, DC. It is a smaller package than the original Switchblade 600 and larger than the Switchblade 300 variants.

LASSO's requirement is for a munition with a 40 km range that weighs under 40 lb. The Switchblade 400's all-up round weighs about 39 lb, according to a specification spreadsheet. It has a total payload capacity of 7 lb.

To get to that size, the company reduced the optics to one electro-optical and one infrared sensor, but it has maintained the Javelin multi-purpose warhead. It is tube-launched and uses rocket-assisted launch, which also helps to lighten the load, Young said. “It's a softer and quieter way of launching [the] loader and munition out of a tube,” he said. “Compared to a gas generator that allows us to lighten the rest of the bird and put everything in a slightly smaller package.”

The new loitering munition's battery provides roughly the same range as the Switchblade 600 at about 40 minutes and more than 65 km, Young said.

It has an NVIDIA-based processor that will support automatic target recognition and aided target recognition. It also has a modular warhead to bring on new warheads and modular architecture for radios, he added.