[SHOT 2026] SIG Partners with IAI to Develop the Firestorm Armed Drone

There was a little bit of a drone theme at this year’s SHOT Show, with some of the companies showing off how their weapons could be integrated with medium-size rotor drones. Yesterday we showed you Colt’s collaboration with SURVICE to mount a 40mm automatic MK47 grenade launcher on a drone and today we bring you SIG Sauer’s impressive integration of an M250 on a IAI quad-rotor drone.

Chatting to SIG Sauer they explained that the idea behind the machine gun-armed drone was to provide loitering air support - perhaps to a piece of key infrastructure, a forward operating base or even a moving convoy. The drones can provide an ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capability and a sort of localised, sustained, unmanned combat air patrol. They achieve extended loitering time by staging sorties of multiple drones - as one's fuel depletes or its ammunition is expended another drone can be deployed. This can be done to enable 24 hour coverage. Our friends at Soldier Systems Daily have some additional photos from a recent SIG demonstration.

The IAI APUS-60 has been mounted with a SIG M250 belt-fed machine gun mounted on an aerial variant of an ultra light remote weapon station and is aimed using a SIG Optics-developed electro-optical aiming system. The optics can detect targets out to 25km using an electro optical sensor with 10x zoom and the Infrared sensor which offers 5x zoom for night time operations.  The APUS-60 has a payload capacity of 35kg or 77lbs and when equipped with an M250 it can carry up to 200 rounds of 7.62x51mm. The feed system can vary between a sliding ammo tray or a drum containing the belt.

The system was developed at the request of a foreign military client. We saw some demonstration video that showed the drone firing rapid semi-automatic shots with little movement caused by the recoil of the gun - the drone automatically compensates for this when it's in its station holding mode. While there has already been successful use of firearms integrated onto drones in Ukraine, the larger systems seen at SHOT Show have greater loitering time and more firepower with sophisticated aiming and control systems.