Pentagon picks Picket’s rotating turret for counter-drone test

A U.S. defense startup has been selected by the Defense Innovation Unit, a Department of War organization focused on accelerating commercial technology into military use, to advance an autonomous close-in weapon system designed to reduce aiming latency in close-in counter-drone engagements, moving into Phase II testing in front of Department of War evaluators this month.

Picket Defense Systems announced Tuesday that the Defense Innovation Unit selected the company for Phase II of its Counter-UAS Close-In Kinetic Defeat Enhancement program, specifically the Remote Weapon System Enhancement track. The selection advances Picket’s Inferno RTC system through the DIU’s Commercial Solutions Opening process, a procurement pathway that can lead directly to prototype contracts and accelerated fielding without the years-long timelines of traditional military acquisition. Phase II means Picket will demonstrate the Inferno RTC’s capabilities in front of DIU and Department of War evaluators in live testing, the stage where paper claims become documented performance.

The aiming latency problem the Inferno RTC is designed to solve sits at the heart of why existing close-in weapon systems struggle against coordinated drone swarms. Every conventional counter-drone gun, whether vehicle-mounted or fixed at a site, must physically rotate or slew a barrel to point at an incoming threat before it can fire. On fast electromechanical systems that slew time is measured in fractions of a second, which against a single drone at moderate speed is manageable. Against a swarm of fast-moving drones arriving simultaneously from multiple directions, it becomes an insurmountable sequencing problem: the system can only point at one threat at a time, and while it is aiming at threat number one, threats two, three, and four are closing the distance unchallenged. That tactical reality has driven adversary swarm doctrine in exactly this direction, deliberately using multiple simultaneous vectors to saturate single-barrel defenses that cannot be in two places at once.

The Inferno RTC is built around a patented rotating turret design that mounts multiple munition barrels at fixed elevation angles on a spherical frame, continuously sweeping a complete 360-degree hemisphere as the turret rotates. When onboard passive sensors detect and classify a threat, the system’s onboard AI selects the optimal barrel and fires, with no slew-to-target delay because a barrel is already in approximately the correct position for any threat vector at any moment. Picket describes the result as a 40-meter (131-foot) assured-kill zone covering the full sphere around the system with what it calls zero aiming latency. Those claims have not yet been independently validated and should be treated as the company’s stated performance targets pending Phase II evaluation results.

The passive sensor architecture the system uses for targeting adds a dimension that active radar-based systems cannot replicate. Passive sensors detect threats by receiving energy the target emits or reflects rather than broadcasting radar emissions that an adversary can detect and geo-locate. A radar-based counter-drone system announces its own position every time it emits, which in a contested electromagnetic environment gives an adversary the ability to locate and target the defense asset before engaging it. A passive system that can detect, classify, and engage targets without emitting anything is inherently harder to locate and suppress, which matters significantly in high-threat environments where counter-battery and anti-radiation targeting of air defense assets is a standard adversary tactic.

The Defense Innovation Unit’s selection of Picket for this program fits a pattern the organization has been executing consistently over the past several years: identifying commercially developed technology that addresses specific military capability gaps, validating it through a structured competitive process, and using the Commercial Solutions Opening pathway to move from prototype to fielding faster than traditional procurement cycles allow. DIU was established in 2015 specifically to bridge the gap between commercial technology and the Pentagon, and its counter-UAS programs have become one of its most active investment areas as the drone threat has accelerated across both conventional conflict and irregular warfare environments. The CSO pathway Picket is moving through can lead to Other Transaction Authority contracts, a procurement mechanism that bypasses many of the regulatory requirements of traditional defense contracting and allows faster iteration between prototype and production versions.

The specific quantities, contract values, and testing timeline for Phase II have not been publicly disclosed by Picket or DIU. What the Phase II selection confirms is that the Inferno RTC’s technical claims survived the competitive assessment of the first phase and that the concept now advances to the harder test: demonstrating consistent performance against representative threats in front of evaluators who will determine whether it merits a prototype contract and eventual fielding.