Harrier
The cheap, long-loiter hunter that replaces the Reaper habit. Harrier lives in the medium-altitude band, swaps pallets like trucks swap trailers, and is priced to be lost without a congressional hearing.
Harrier
MQ-26B
Meridian design bureau
Conceptual · not a program of record
- Unit cost
- $8.50M
- Combat radius
- 1,200 nm
- Endurance
- 28 h
- Speed
- 280 kt
- Ceiling
- 42,000 ft
- Payload
- 450 kg
- FY26 buy
- 60
- Rate / year
- 220
Launch / recover
Launch. Runway, dirt strip, or JATO from ship deck
Recover. Autoland / net / skid — no arresting gear required
C2. Distributed ground stations + CCA mesh; one operator supervises four tails
Why it is better
- Cheaper than the publicly briefed MMA air-vehicle target
- Runway-optional so it survives the first missile rain on a main operating base
- Modular bay: ISR, strike, or relay in a two-hour pallet swap
- Built for one-to-four crew ratio, not one-to-one Reaper crews
Nav (GNSS optional)
- vision-inertial
- celestial
- LEO sat-time only (no GNSS fix required)
Sense
- modular EO/IR turret
- GMTI pod
- SIGINT pallet
- SAR
Effect
- Hellfire-class
- glide munitions
- comms relay
- leaflets / non-kinetic
Against the public program
Massed Modular Aircraft (MMA) / MQ-9A Reaper
Public. MMA air vehicle ~$10M; 100 by 2029, 500 by 2032; intended to take Reaper missions
Gap. Reaper is exquisite and runway-bound; MMA not yet a program of record with fielded tails
Meridian. $8.5M airframe, 28 hr endurance, runway-optional, four-tails-per-crew from day one