For a few years now the standard advice for a soldier worried about a small drone has been some version of: carry a shotgun. A shotgun throws a cloud of pellets, you don’t have to be very accurate, and a quadcopter is a fragile thing. It’s the last line of defense, the thing you reach for after the jammers and the radar-cued guns have failed. So there is something pleasing about the latest addition to the Pentagon’s list of approved drones, which is a drone that carries the shotgun.
As Chris Panella reported in Business Insider, Skyborne Technologies’ Cerberus MI, an AI-enabled, man-portable drone, was added this month to the Blue UAS List, the catalog of uncrewed systems the US military and other federal agencies are cleared to buy. Skyborne announced the listing on October 26, calling the Cerberus MI an armed, reusable Group 2 platform and saying that units can now buy and fly it without an exception to policy.
The specs, per the company: about 40 pounds, roughly 35 minutes of flight when armed, and the ability to hit targets more than 300 meters away. It takes one of two weapons, a CHAOS 12-gauge shotgun or a HAVOC 40mm low-velocity grenade launcher. According to Skyborne’s release, the shotgun holds 10 rounds and the grenade launcher holds five, and both use standard ammunition.
Recoil is the product
The interesting engineering claim is that this isn’t a commercial drone with a gun zip-tied to the bottom. Skyborne says it designed the airframe specifically to soak up the kick of the shotgun. This is less trivial than it sounds. A gun pushes back on whatever is holding it, and if the thing holding it weighs 40 pounds and is hovering in midair, it gets shoved. Your shoulder absorbs a shotgun’s recoil for you; a drone has to have planned for it. The company’s product page says the aircraft can aim its payload without a weapon gimbal, which I take to mean the whole drone does the aiming, and the whole drone takes the hit.
Then there’s the business model, which is mostly about reloading. An operator flies the Cerberus MI out, fires, and flies it back to reload. Skyborne pitches that as a reusable alternative to one-way attack drones, which are usually destroyed when they hit something. The appeal is just arithmetic. A kamikaze drone is a weapon you buy once per target. A drone that fires shotgun shells is a weapon you buy once, and after that you buy shotgun shells. If the drone survives, the cost per shot is roughly the cost of the ammunition, which the military already stockpiles. Whether the drone survives is, of course, the entire question, and one that the procurement list doesn’t really try to answer.
Skyborne, which is based in Brisbane, says the drone uses its EXITUS AI software to help find and track targets, but that the decision to fire stays with a human. That is the standard formulation, and it is doing a lot of work.
What the list actually checks
Here is the thing to understand about the Blue UAS List: it is not really a test of whether a drone is good at shooting things. The program, set up in 2020, exists to find drones that meet US government standards, above all on cybersecurity and supply chains. The Defense Innovation Unit ran it until last year, when responsibility moved to the Defense Contract Management Agency on December 3, 2025, and DCMA launched a dedicated site cataloging approved models. Drones, drone parts and software all qualify. DCMA’s pitch was that a single vetted list would get drones to troops faster, as the Defense Department and other agencies push to fold uncrewed systems into everything they do.
And a big part of the vetting is just checking for Chinese components. According to the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, Chinese companies control 90% of the commercial drone market, and US officials have worried out loud about the leverage that gives Beijing. If you’re the Pentagon and you want to buy a lot of small drones in a hurry, the easiest thing to buy is a Chinese one, and the easiest thing to ban is a Chinese one, so you need a list of the ones that are left.
So the review that cleared a flying 12-gauge spent much of its effort, as Skyborne’s release describes it, on cybersecurity, supply chain, and foreign ownership, control or influence. Which makes sense! A drone with a grenade launcher whose firmware phones home to a foreign server is a much worse problem than a camera drone that does the same. But it does mean the stamp of approval is, at heart, a procurement credential. It tells a contracting officer that buying the thing won’t get anyone in trouble. It says much less about whether the thing works.
Not the only one
Shotgun drones aren’t new. Ukrainian defense company 3DTech built one with a six-barrel recoilless shotgun system meant to knock down enemy drones, and in the US, Federal Ammunition, Mossberg and Palladyne AI are working together on a project called SwarmShot. Ukraine has also been putting AI-guided gun turrets on Russian drones, and the US is running its own counter-drone trials on the southern border. Put all that together and the market starts to look recursive. Shotguns were the cheap way to shoot down drones. Now drones carry shotguns, which you could aim at other drones, which in turn will presumably carry shotguns of their own.
The bar for joining the Pentagon’s approved list, meanwhile, is that none of the parts come from China, so somewhere a compliance team has signed off on the country of origin of every component in a flying shotgun. That seems like the correct order of priorities for a procurement office, and a slightly odd one for everyone else.