US Marines Deploy AI Rifle Scope Against Iranian Drones

Strip away the press release language. What the Marine Corps just fielded is a rifle scope that decides when to pull the trigger so the Marine doesn’t have to get it wrong.

The SMASH 2000L, built by Israeli defense firm Smart Shooter, is now in the hands of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard the USS Portland as part of Operation Epic Fury, the US-Israel military campaign against Iran that began February 28, as BGR reported.

Photos from DVIDS confirm Marines trained with the system in April aboard ship, and Task and Purpose has verified with Smart Shooter directly that those scopes are the real thing.

What the SMASH 2000L Actually Does

The SMASH 2000L mounts to any standard Picatinny rail. In its baseline configuration it functions as a red-dot sight. When the operator engages the fire control system, the scope’s dual-core ballistic computer takes over.

Using onboard electro-optical sensors and AI-driven computer vision, the system scans for targets, locks on, and tracks the target’s movement while simultaneously calculating range, speed, wind, and humidity. The rifle physically cannot fire until the algorithm determines a hit is better than 95 percent probable. At that instant, the system releases the shot.

The scope weighs about 2.4 pounds, runs on a lithium-ion battery rated for 3,600 assisted shots per charge, and operates in both day and night modes. A dedicated drone mode adjusts the tracking algorithm for the smaller radar cross-section and faster movement profiles typical of small UAS.

Effective engagement range against drone targets runs to about 820 feet. It’s compatible with the M4 carbine already in every Marine’s hands, which is the entire point of the program.

Smart Shooter, headquartered in Yagur, Israel, first had the SMASH family tested by the Marine Corps in 2021. The US Army awarded Smart Shooter a $13 million contract in May 2025 under the Transformation in Contact 2.0 initiative, which fast-tracks battlefield technologies past the standard multi-year acquisition timeline.

In April 2026, with Operation Epic Fury already underway and Iranian Shahed drones hitting US bases across the Middle East, Joint Interagency Task Force 401 awarded an additional contract specifically for 210 SMASH 2000L units for frontline delivery.

Why Drones Are Breaking the Marine Corps Posture

The 11th MEU is aboard the USS Portland as part of the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group, one component of the more than 50,000 additional US troops deployed to the Middle East since the campaign began.

The drone problem those Marines are training against is not abstract. Iranian forces have launched thousands of Shahed-series drones and smaller FPV weapons against US bases, Gulf partner nations, and commercial shipping since February 28. The UAE alone absorbed more than 2,800 Iranian drone and missile attacks in the first six weeks of the conflict.

The mismatch that created the SMASH 2000L program is the same one showing up everywhere in this conflict. Most shipboard and vehicle-mounted US air defense systems are designed for the threat they were built to counter, which is fast jets and ballistic missiles.

They’re not always available at scale or practical for individual dismounted infantry units. A Shahed-136 flying at 110 mph is a difficult shot for even a trained marksman using conventional iron sights.

The SMASH removes that variable. Lt. Col. Eric Flanagan, spokesman for Marine Corps Combat Development and Integration, stated plainly that the system “will give the rifleman the ability to quickly obtain a positive firing solution and increase their probability of kill when engaging Unmanned Aircraft Systems.”

JIATF-401 has now committed more than $600 million in counter-UAS capabilities for Epic Fury and domestic defense combined, with $350 million deployed in the first 30 days of the conflict alone. The DOD also launched a new counter-UAV online marketplace in April to accelerate purchases.

Army Brigadier General Matt Ross, who heads JIATF-401, has been explicit that even a capable system like the SMASH is one layer in a required stack: “a layered defense that includes distributed sensing, the ability to track in real time, and capabilities to engage with both non-kinetic and kinetic countermeasures. This purchase does not solve that problem, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

How the SMASH Family Scales

The SMASH 2000L is the handheld entry point in a broader family of fire control systems. Smart Shooter also produces the SMASH X4, which adds 4x magnification and a laser rangefinder for longer-range engagements, and the SMASH Hopper, a remote-controlled weapon station that uses the same fire control technology mounted on tripods, masts, or light vehicles.

The Hopper is already integrated with DRS RADA Technologies’ Multi-Mission Hemispheric Radar on Marine platforms, creating a sensor-to-shooter chain that goes from radar track to engagement solution without a human in the aiming loop.

Smart Shooter completed an initial public offering on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in the middle of the Iran conflict, raising roughly $65 million at a company valuation of approximately $175 million. That’s a company going from boutique defense contractor to publicly traded entity on the back of a shooting war that proved exactly the use case its product was built for.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s the honest part. The SMASH 2000L is a genuinely elegant solution to a real problem, and the reason it matters for the broader drone industry isn’t the Iran conflict specifically. It’s what the system represents architecturally.

Drone defense has spent the last decade gravitating toward dedicated platforms: jammer trucks, laser emitters, interceptor missiles, electronic warfare vans. All of those have roles. None of them are available to the infantry squad standing on a rooftop at 2 a.m. when a modified commercial quadcopter appears over the wall.

The SMASH answers a different question: what’s the cheapest, most distributable, soldier-portable counter-drone capability that can be fielded at mass scale right now, using equipment already in inventory?

The answer turns out to be a 2.4-pound scope that clips onto an M4. At somewhere in the range of $60,000 per unit based on the JIATF-401 contract math, it’s not cheap. But it’s cheap compared to a Coyote interceptor or a Patriot missile, and it goes where the Marine goes.

That’s the tradeoff the Corps is making, and given what the past two months in the Middle East have demonstrated about the drone threat, it looks like a reasonable one.

For American drone enthusiasts watching this story from the hobbyist side, the SMASH 2000L is a useful reminder of where the regulatory environment is heading. Every commercial quadcopter that gets modified into a weapons platform, every Shahed that hits a US base, every incident that forces the Pentagon to spend another $350 million in 30 days on counter-drone systems, tightens the policy screws on civilian UAS operations.

The technology in that scope is the downstream consequence of a threat that started with cheap commercial drones and grew into a strategic liability.

Photo credit: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Avery Wayland