A recently released picture of the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Bainbridge offers a good look at new launchers for Coyote counter-drone interceptors installed on the ship. Earlier this year, the U.S. Navy announced that destroyers assigned to escort the supercarrier USS Gerald R. Fordwould be armed with Raytheon Coyote and/or Anduril Roadrunner-M counter-drone systems. (From: The War Zone.)
In addition to being lower-cost than traditional surface-to-air missiles, Coyote and Roadrunner-M have loitering capabilities that allow them to be more dynamically employed against incoming uncrewed threats.
The Navy released the picture of Bainbridge sailing in the Ionian Sea between Italy and Greece over the weekend, but it was taken on July 27, 2025. It is one of three Arleigh Burke class destroyers currently assigned to the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, the others being USS Winston S. Churchill and USS Mitscher. The Winston S. Churchill is serving as the strike group’s air defense commander, a role that certain Arleigh Burkes have increasingly been taking over from a dwindling fleet of aging Ticonderoga class cruisers.
The Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Bainbridge sails in the Ionian Sea on July 27, 2025. The new counter-drone interceptor launcher can be seen installed on the aft superstructure.
A further review of other pictures the Navy has previously released of the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group since its current deployment began in June shows the same launcher installation onboard the Winston S. Churchill. Whether or not it is present on the Mitscher is unclear from the imagery available now. Mitscher is notably an older Flight I Arleigh Burke, while Bainbridge and Winston S. Churchill are both newer Flight IIA subvariants, but whether this has any bearing on the fielding of the new counter-drone capabilities is unknown.
All Arleigh Burke class destroyers feature Mk 41 VLS arrays, but with differing numbers of cells depending on the subvariant. These can be loaded with a variety of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles, including Standard Missile (SM) series, Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSM), and Tomahawk types. Some versions have additional launchers for Harpoon or Naval Strike Missile (NSM) anti-ship cruise missiles. Depending on the particular version, Arleigh Burkes have RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) launchers or 20mm Vulcan cannon-armed Mk 15 Phalanx Close-in Weapon Systems (CIWS), or both in some cases, for close-in defense against aerial threats, including drones. The Navy is now moving to replace the Phalanxes on all of its destroyers with RAM launchers. The 5-inch main gun in a turret on the bow of each of the destroyers can also be employed against aerial, as well as surface targets.
The launchers seen in both the pictures of Bainbridge and Winston S. Churchill show a clear relationship to existing ground-based launchers for Block 2 counter-drone versions of Coyote.
To date, Anduril has only shown a box-type “hangar” or “nest” for Roadrunner-M that launches the interceptor vertically, as seen in the video below. Launchers more in line with that design are not visible, at least readily, in the available pictures of any of the destroyers assigned to the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group.
Coyote Block 2 and Roadrunner-M are both drone-like jet-powered interceptors with differing degrees of loitering capability, which we will come back to later. They both have to be cued to their targets, or a general target area, using a mixture of sensors before their onboard seekers take over.
The U.S. Army has already been fielding Coyote Block 2 for years as part of its Low, Slow, Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System (LIDS), which comes in mobile and fixed-site variations, as you can read more about here. The Army has deployed LIDS in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, and has employed them in combat in at least some of those locales. Recently released pictures indicate the U.S. Air Force has also become an operator of the fixed-site version of LIDS.
Elements of the U.S. special operations community are known to have fielded Roadrunner-M in a land-based configuration, though details of its use to date are limited. A major U.S. military order for additional Roadrunner-Ms last year pointed to expanding use of the system.
As noted, a key attribute that Coyote and Roadrunner-M offer is their ability to loiter. This provides added flexibility to task and retask them dynamically in real time in response to sudden changes in the threat picture. They can also be launched preemptively against potential threats. Roadrunner-M was specifically designed with this employment model in mind, and has the added ability to be recovered, refueled, and relaunched, as you can read about more in this past feature. These are capabilities that traditional surface-to-air missiles simply do not have and that are otherwise unavailable to warship crews at present, beyond employing the ship’s rotary-wing assets, if available.
The capabilities that Coyote Block 2 and Roadrunner-M offer are also particularly important for warships given their limitations when it comes to both the size of their magazines and the ability to readily reload them while deployed. The Navy has been separately working to field new at-sea reloading capabilities, driven in large part now by lessons learned from shooting down Houthi drones and missiles in and around the Red Sea, as well as knocking down Iranian threats headed toward Israel. Experiences tackling Houthi drones were a key driver behind the installation of the new counter-drone interceptors on the destroyers in the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group in the first place. Drone threats to American warships, as well as facilities and other assets ashore, are, of course, not new, as TWZ has been highlighting for years now.
As mentioned, Coyote Block 2 and Roadrunner-M have the added benefit of being lower-cost layers of defense against drones compared to existing ship-launched surface-to-air missiles. A single Block 2 Coyote is reportedly around $100,000. Anduril has previously said that each Roadrunner-M has a price tag somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. For comparison, an SM-2 Block IIIC, a go-to air defense weapon for the Navy’s Arleigh Burkes, has an average unit cost of around $2 million, according to the service’s 2026 Fiscal Year budget request. The price point for a single ESSM, another air defense staple on American warships, is around $1.65 million.
Last year, TWZ laid out a detailed case for adding a variety of drone types, including ones able to operate in swarms, to the arsenals of Navy ships to provide additional layers of defense, as well as enhanced strike, electronic warfare, intelligence-gathering, and networking capabilities, which you can find here.
Whether or not launchers for Coyote Block 2 and/or Roadrunner-M become a standard feature on Arleigh Burke destroyers or other Navy vessels remains to be seen. The Navy has at least tested one or both of those systems on two other Arleigh Burkes, the USS Jason Dunham and USS The Sullivans, according to Naval News.
The Navy is separately pursuing a variety of other capabilities to bolster air and missile defenses on its surface warships, including new directed energy weapons, electronic warfare suites, and advanced networked decoys.
The USS Gerald R. Ford “will deploy with some additional counter-UAS [uncrewed aerial systems] capabilities, and then we’ll continue to look and learn and develop those capabilities as we go forward,” a senior Navy official told TWZ and other outlets at a briefing regarding the Pentagon’s 2026 Fiscal Year budget request in June.
Lockheed Martin is also notably pitching launchers for the AGM-179 Joint Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM), which could also potentially be used in the anti-air role, as an addition to the Arleigh Burke‘s arsenal. The company has shown models with JAGM launchers installed in the same general location on the aft superstructure where Bainbridge and Winston S. Churchill now have their new counter-drone capabilities. At least some number of the Navy’s Freedom class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) are capable now of engaging drones, as well as surface threats with millimeter-wave radar-guided AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire missiles, one of the weapons JAGM is set to eventually supplant.
In the meantime, Bainbridge and Winston S. Churchill, at least, have gotten important boosts in their ability to defend against incoming drones.
