The military already has small drones, ranging from the palm-sized Black Hornet to the hand-tossed Raven. But these are either, in the case of the Black Hornet, mostly the domain of Special Forces, or like the Raven, kept at the Company level, and neither of these drones are cheap. Ravens cost at least 250,000 a system, when set up to military specifications. Yet drones, especially ones deployed at the squad level, don't have to be expensive. Commercial quadcopters and toy drones have seen use in the Ukrainian civil war, and there, soldiers trying to shoot them down with rifles.

Drones first glided into the public imagination in the early 2000s when the US Air Force and the CIA started using school bus-sized Predator and Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and airstrikes in the Middle East. These days, the US Army wants something a bit smaller: Pocket-sized drones that soldiers can use in battle zones to see around corners, over hills, or behind trees to aoid ambushes and other surprises. Ideally, soldiers will be able to launch such a nano-drone quickly, the Army says. "It will send real-time video back to the operator to give them real-time situational awareness of what's in the immediate vicinity," says says Phil Cheatham, the deputy branch chief for electronics at the Army's Maneuvers Center for Excellence (MCOE). The Army wants something affordable that can be ordered in bulk to provide a drone to each squad. The Army already uses satellite imagery and larger drones to provide broader battlefield intelligence, Cheatham says.