Army Troops Test Anti-Drone Bullets for Standard Rifles

This article is about two things that I really like: drones and guns. The U.S. Army just gave soldiers the simplest possible counter-drone tool: a bullet.

Troops assigned to the XVIII Airborne Corps Signal Detachment conducted live-fire training with the 5.56mm L-variant Drone Round at Oak Grove Training Center in North Carolina on April 9, 2026, as Defence Blog reported.

They loaded it into their standard M4 carbines and shot down an FPV drone. No new weapon. No special attachment. No additional training pipeline. Just swap the magazine and look up.

How the Drone Round Works

The Drone Round is made by Drone Round Defense, a company that shares leadership with Freedom Munitions, Unlimited Ammo, and Ammo Load. The concept is almost aggressively simple. Take a standard 5.56mm NATO cartridge, engineer the projectile to fragment after leaving the barrel, and turn a rifle into something that behaves like a very fast, very precise shotgun.

The round comes in two variants. The K-variant splits into eight projectiles with an effective range of about 165 feet.

The L-variant, which the XVIII Airborne troops used at Oak Grove, splits into five slightly larger projectiles with an effective range of roughly 330 feet. The 5.56mm version exits the muzzle at 2,200 feet per second, roughly twice the velocity of a standard 12-gauge shotgun shell.

That speed and dispersion pattern address the central problem infantry units face when trying to shoot down a small drone with conventional ammunition. An FPV drone is a tiny, erratically moving target traveling at speed. Hitting it with a single 5.56mm bullet is like trying to swat a hummingbird with a chopstick.

The Drone Round gives soldiers a spreading pattern that dramatically increases the odds of putting fragments on target.

The round feeds identically to standard ball ammunition through STANAG magazines or belt-fed systems. It cycles in semi-auto and full-auto, works suppressed, and requires zero modifications to the weapon. A soldier can load Drone Rounds alongside regular ammunition in the same magazine.

The company says its entirely domestic production line can manufacture up to 350 million rounds per year. A 7.62x51mm NATO version is also in development, with velocity figures still being tested. Drone Round Defense also has 6.8x51mm development in the pipeline, which would make it compatible with the Army’s new XM7 rifle.

The XVIII Airborne Connection

The April 9 training session wasn’t the first time Drone Round showed up at Fort Bragg’s doorstep. The company’s initial Army demonstration happened in December 2025 at Oak Grove Technology Center, the same 200-plus-acre kinetic training range about an hour west of Fort Bragg.

That event was part of the XVIII Airborne Corps’ Joint Innovation Outpost Program, a framework specifically designed to connect small, non-traditional defense companies to operational Army requirements.

The fact that XVIII Airborne Corps came back for a second round (pun fully intended) is meaningful. This wasn’t a one-off industry showcase. The 22nd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment documented the April session as unit-level familiarization training, meaning the Army is treating this as a capability soldiers need to practice, not just watch.

The training was framed as part of an ongoing effort to rapidly advance operational counter-UAS capabilities at the squad and platoon level.

Staff Sgt. Dwayne Oxley of XVIII Airborne Corps Headquarters and Support Company was identified training with the L-variant during the exercise. The unit chose Signal Detachment personnel for the session, which makes sense.

Signal troops set up and maintain communications infrastructure, exactly the kind of fixed-position work that makes you a target for an FPV drone operator looking for easy kills.

The Bigger Picture: Both Sides Are Doing This

The timing of the Oak Grove training is worth noting. On the same day, Russia’s TASS news agency reported that Kalashnikov Concern is testing a 5.45mm multi-projectile cartridge designed to engage FPV drones from the standard AK-12.

The approaches differ in caliber and design details, but the underlying problem is identical: infantry squads need something they can shoot at drones right now, with what they’re already carrying.

Ukraine has already moved further down this road. Kyiv’s Brave1 innovation program has fielded NATO-compatible 5.56mm anti-drone rounds like the Horoshok, which splits into multiple sub-projectiles traveling at over 2,600 feet per second and is reported effective out to about 165 feet.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence has codified several anti-drone cartridges and is scaling serial production toward a standard combat load that includes at least one dedicated anti-drone magazine per soldier.

That’s where this is heading for every army that takes the drone threat seriously. The FPV problem doesn’t stop at the battery of electronic warfare systems or the dedicated counter-UAS team.

It goes all the way down to the individual rifleman standing guard at a checkpoint or maintaining an antenna. Dedicated systems handle the high end. Rifle-fired anti-drone rounds are the last line of defense when a $500 drone closes to 300 feet and there’s nothing between it and a soldier but an M4 and good reflexes.

DroneXL’s Take

I’ll be direct, this is simultaneously the most exciting and most humbling counter-drone development I’ve covered in months.

Exciting because the elegance is hard to beat. No new weapon system to procure. No new training pipeline to build. No new logistics chain to establish. Plain, no bullshit. You take the rifle every soldier already carries, hand them a different magazine, and they have an organic counter-drone capability. The XVIII Airborne Corps figured this out in a single afternoon at a range in North Carolina. That’s the kind of simplicity that actually scales.

Humbling because think about what it means. We’ve built jammers, directed energy weapons, micro-missiles, interceptor drones, autonomous networked kill chains, and AI-powered acoustic detection systems.

All of that is necessary and important. But at the end of the day, the Army also needs a bullet that turns into a tiny shotgun blast because sometimes a $500 drone is 300 feet away and closing fast, and all you’ve got is your rifle and about two seconds to react. That’s the reality of modern warfare compressed into a single cartridge.

The effective range is the honest limitation. The L-variant tops out at about 330 feet, and the K-variant at 165 feet. That’s not a lot of distance when an FPV drone can cover 330 feet in roughly two seconds.

Soldiers will need to detect the threat, identify it, swap to the right magazine or at least know where their Drone Rounds are loaded, aim, and fire, all inside a window that makes a fast-draw competition look leisurely. Training matters enormously here, and the fact that XVIII Airborne is already doing familiarization sessions is the right move.

The production capacity claim of 350 million rounds per year is significant if it holds up. That’s the kind of scale that could actually put anti-drone magazines in the hands of every deployed soldier, not just specialized units. Whether the Army makes this a program of record or it stays a commercially led capability will determine if Drone Round becomes standard issue or remains a niche curiosity.

Given what’s happening in Ukraine, where anti-drone rifle ammo is already part of the standard combat load, I’d bet on the former. The question isn’t whether infantry needs this capability. It’s how long the procurement system takes to catch up with what soldiers are already proving works on the range.

Photo credit: Drone Round Defense