U.S. tests Hornet drones against Chinese landing vehicle targets

American forces deployed Hornet strike drones during the Balikatan 2026 exercise in the Philippines, using the small pneumatic-launched weapons to destroy maritime targets simulating Chinese ZBD-05 amphibious assault vehicles in live-fire drills — marking one of the first confirmed appearances of the system in the Indo-Pacific theater.

Balikatan 2026, the annual U.S.-Philippine bilateral exercise, ran from April 20 to May 8, 2026, focusing on advanced maritime warfighting, counter-landing live-fire drills, and multinational interoperability. Published footage from the exercise shows a Hornet drone striking a target representing a ZBD-05, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy Marine Corps’ primary amphibious infantry fighting vehicle, capable of swimming ashore from landing ships and engaging targets immediately upon beaching. Selecting a ZBD-05 surrogate as the Hornet’s live-fire target in an exercise centered on counter-landing operations is not an incidental choice — it reflects the precise operational scenario that U.S. and Philippine planners are most focused on in the South China Sea.

The Hornet is manufactured by Perennial Autonomy, a U.S. defense technology company that has built a reputation for producing affordable, long-range strike drones with sophisticated electronic warfare-resistant guidance software incorporating artificial intelligence elements.

The system is launched via pneumatic catapult, making it deployable from locations without runways or launch infrastructure, and carries guidance algorithms specifically designed to maintain target acquisition and terminal accuracy in contested electromagnetic environments where conventional GPS-guided weapons are vulnerable to jamming and spoofing. Its range exceeds 60 miles, giving operators significant standoff from the targets they engage and from the air defense systems that would otherwise threaten the launching unit.

The cost picture around the Hornet is contested and unconfirmed by the manufacturer itself, which has not publicly commented on pricing or detailed technical specifications. German military analyst Julian Röpcke has cited an estimated unit cost of approximately $5,000 per drone, while other sources place the individual airframe cost closer to $12,000, with a complete system package consisting of five drones, a pneumatic catapult, and a ground control station priced at approximately $160,000 total. The manufacturer has not confirmed any of these figures, and they should be treated as estimates from external sources rather than verified pricing. What is not in dispute is the basic value proposition: at any of those price points, the Hornet costs a small fraction of the targets it is designed to destroy and an even smaller fraction of the missile interceptors that adversaries would need to shoot it down.

The Hornet’s appearance at Balikatan 2026 follows a pattern of expanding deployment across multiple theaters. U.S. forces have actively deployed the system during exercises in Poland, Germany, and Lithuania, establishing a European operational baseline before the system moved into the Indo-Pacific. That sequencing, Europe first, then the Pacific, reflects the drone’s combat validation in Ukraine, where Perennial Autonomy’s Hornet drones have been employed by Ukrainian forces with documented operational results. According to reporting on the Ukrainian deployment, Hornet drones have contributed to Ukrainian forces establishing control over a critical land corridor from mainland Russia leading to occupied Crimea, with the weapons striking Russian logistics columns at significant distances from the front line, disrupting ammunition and equipment supply to Russian forward units. The long-range interdiction role the Hornet has demonstrated in Ukraine translates directly to the counter-landing and maritime strike missions that Balikatan 2026 was designed to rehearse.

The Hornet’s combination of extended range, AI-assisted guidance, electronic warfare resistance, and low unit cost addresses a capability gap that conventional munitions cannot fill at scale. Expensive precision-guided missiles can destroy individual high-value targets with certainty, but they are not the right tool for attriting a mass amphibious assault wave across 60 miles of open water. A drone that costs a few thousand dollars, flies autonomously to its target area, identifies and strikes an amphibious vehicle, and does so in a jammed electromagnetic environment, changes the cost calculus of contested littoral warfare in ways that military planners in both Washington and Beijing are actively working to understand.