Anduril says Altius is designed for reconnaissance and carrying munitions, can operate from land, air or sea, and depending on the model can conduct long range attacks while remaining airborne for many hours. The company has supplied hundreds of drones to Ukraine since 2022, including around 100 Altius systems delivered in 2023 under a 40 million USD contract for Black Sea operations.
Reports of failed tests have appeared as part of what Anduril describes as a wave of critical coverage relying on narrow examples. The company said that “a cluster of stories has surfaced that all follow a similar pattern” and argued that some outlets had “sought to portray a small handful of alleged setbacks at government experimentation, testing, and integration events, minus any context, as somehow evidence of a broader shortcoming of our company and of defense technology companies more broadly.”
The company said these accounts resemble earlier attempts to challenge firms disrupting established defence programmes. It stated that the “playbook is familiar: cherry-pick facts, elevate anomalies into cautionary tales, and assemble it all into a broader indictment of an entire company or category of companies.”
Anduril said scrutiny was expected but expressed disappointment that reporting “largely relies on the same isolated incidents and even contains many of the same factual errors, almost as if they stem from common sourcing.” It added that experiences of this kind suggest “not that Anduril is failing, but that we are going in the right direction and changing the industry in positive ways that unnerve proponents of the status quo.”
The company described its development cycle as highly iterative and based on constant testing, acknowledging “we do fail … a lot.” It said the incidents highlighted in recent articles represent only a small part of the thousands of annual tests carried out by more than 200 engineers across six sites, explaining that any isolated setback “might look bad, like a Starship blowing up on launch” but that such events are an essential part of progress.
Anduril cited an example from an Altius trial in which routine checks at a separate site showed a software issue that caused the launch tube to recoil in a way that raised safety concerns. It said the demonstration was paused, the fault identified and fixed, and that “two days later, Altius flew successfully.”
The company also referenced a Ghost X practice run in January in which the aircraft briefly entered an unstable spin and the clip was shared online. It said the cause was identified, a fix implemented and validated, and that soldiers subsequently operated Ghost X successfully during the training exercise.
According to Anduril, this incident must be viewed within a larger performance record that includes thousands of flight hours across multiple Army units and multinational exercises. It said the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division logged more than 200 hours across nearly 400 sorties and “performed 300 percent more effectively against the opposing force compared to units without Ghost X,” and added that 13 Army units flew more than 1,200 hours with the system over the past year, praising its reliability, modularity and ease of use.
The company said similar patterns apply in software and integration programmes, including the NGC2 command and control platform, where early security reviews found vulnerabilities in the testing environment that were corrected within weeks. It added that large scale integration events bring together systems built on different assumptions and that such exercises are the right place for issues to surface, citing a case in which several uncrewed surface vessels had to be towed to shore due to a software fault that was later fixed before testing resumed.
Anduril linked the value of this approach directly to battlefield conditions in Ukraine, describing it as “the most contested, data rich, and technologically volatile battlespace in the world.” It said early in the conflict Altius and Ghost struggled under intense electronic warfare pressure that left many drones with effective hit rates of only 10 to 15 percent, prompting reassessment of designs and roles.
The company said it has maintained a near continuous presence in Ukraine funded by its own research, with engineers working alongside units to observe system behaviour, collect data, deploy updates and validate improvements. It added that Ghost underwent substantial redesign based on Ukrainian feedback, culminating in Ghost X, which later met new performance standards both in Ukraine and in US Government electronic warfare testing.
Anduril said it has never claimed perfect solutions but emphasised that capability in the field, improving under real conditions, is what the Pentagon is seeking. It cited the view that “an 85 percent solution in the hands of our armed forces today is infinitely better than an unachievable 100 percent solution that arrives too late to matter,” adding that it intends to continue rapid testing and iteration because “the mission won’t wait.”
