What if a rifle squad is offered a precision strike capability that can be carried on foot and launched in minutes, as opposed to waiting for artillery or air support?
The Marine Corps’ Organic Precision Fires-Light (OPF-L) program was founded on this question, extending beyond “drone as camera” to a weapon system that a small unit can use in a cluttered, littoral environment. The need statement is very challenging: truly man-portable, rapidly deployable, and accessible to non-operators while still extending beyond line of sight. This is in line with the Force Design vision of dispersed teams that can sense and strike from hard positions, especially in environments where infrastructure, communications, and air support are not assured.
In this respect, Anduril’s Bolt-M has been chosen for a $23.9 million production contract, including over 600 systems. Bolt-M is a vertical takeoff and landing quadcopter loitering munition intended to be carried with a compact control kit and launched from restricted ground without rails or catapults. The system’s touted performance specifications 20+ kilometers of range, approximately 40 minutes of endurance, and approximately 13-15 pounds of total weight reflect the true engineering trade space: sufficient range and time on station to make decisions, but not so large as to supplant a unit’s water, batteries, and essential equipment. Anduril has also integrated Bolt-M with its Lattice software framework to support planning, sensing, and engagement with multiple feeds, seeking an operational interface more akin to a modern handheld device than a traditional unmanned control.
The pace of the program is a reflection of the rapid speed at which the loitering munitions have moved from special operations to mainstream. Anduril announced the Bolt series of loitering munitions in October 2024 and has since then supplied more than 250 units of the Bolt-M to the OPF-L for testing in the areas of safety, environment, and performance. The company claims that the industrial variant has been optimized for group production with a capacity of over 100 all-up rounds per month.
But the key developments are not in the air platform. Marine program managers have consistently said that loitering weapons can be accomplished at the squad level only if the development of targeting, communications, and command and control are done in parallel. A parallel requirement is “greater communications between units to coordinate strikes” and better intelligence gathering to target, so that ‘the “full targeting process” can migrate down the chain of command, said a program manager. These are harder, not easier, when Marines are operating around the world, from ships and aircraft, in different environments that test batteries, fuzes, storage safety, and reliability.
Another source of friction is airspace, which is not addressed by “simple” drones. As Marine units have employed other forms of unmanned systems, such as resupply drones, their operators have been confronted with a fundamental interoperability problem: A Direct Air Support Center can solve the problem of deconflicting manned aircraft, but “our systems don’t necessarily talk to his,” said a capabilities integration officer.
A model for visibility comes from commercial aviation tracking, but the level of integration required for military systems must take into account contested networks and control of signature. The OPF-L architecture also represents an institutional hedge. The maximum contract price for the umbrella contract is $249 million, which facilitates the coexistence of different contractors and different versions, and then matures based on feedback from the operating forces.
In a speech at a conference in May 2025, Marine leaders brought up OPF as an extension of combined arms and not a new concept. “OPF, armed drones is combined arms, and we’re very good at doing combined arms,” said Col. Erick Clark. In this sense, the Bolt-M award is more of a forcing function than a product milestone: squads get organic reach, while the Corps is forced to solve the unglamorous engineering and integration challenges of storage, repair paths, airspace coordination, and networked targeting to make “man-packable precision fires” the rule rather than the exception.
