US Army Evaluates Helsing’s HX-2 Loitering Munition at Project Flytrap in Lithuania
Pabradė, 9 June 2026
Key points
- The US Army evaluated Helsing’s HX-2 loitering munition during exercise Project Flytrap at the Pabradė training area in Lithuania, with results disclosed in early June
- Of roughly 200 drone sorties across the exercise, the HX-2 flew 17 — scoring 15 hits and two near misses — with onboard computer vision tracking targets under electronic-warfare conditions
- US Army chief technology officer Alex Miller said the munition served as both a reconnaissance platform and a strike weapon, finding and tracking targets “even under jamming”
- It is the same period an American airframe entered Germany’s own drone competition — capability moving in both directions across the Atlantic
The US Army evaluated Helsing’s HX-2 loitering munition during exercise Project Flytrap at Pabradė in Lithuania, the German firm’s drone flying 17 of the exercise’s roughly 200 sorties for 15 hits and two near misses while tracking targets under jamming — results disclosed in early June by the Army’s chief technology officer.
Alex Miller, the US Army’s chief technology officer, described the HX-2’s performance: the munition operated “as a recon platform and a loitering munition, because it was able to find and track targets with onboard computer vision and fly even under jamming.” That last clause is the result that matters. Loitering munitions are only as good as their resistance to electronic warfare, and the contested electromagnetic environment of Lithuania’s eastern-flank ranges is the closest peacetime proxy for the conditions over Ukraine.
The Flytrap series is the US Army’s vehicle for testing emerging systems alongside allies on NATO’s eastern flank; the HX-2 is Helsing’s mass-producible strike drone, designed for software-defined autonomy and resistance to jamming. An American service putting a German AI-defence product through its paces on the eastern flank is the structurally interesting fact.
The proprietary read. The transatlantic capability flow has reversed direction in miniature. The same month Washington itemised the high-end enablers it is pulling out of Europe, the US Army was evaluating a European drone for the low-end fight it cannot saturate alone — and the same period an American airframe entered Germany’s drone competition. The HX-2 result is a data point in a larger inversion: Europe’s edge is now in cheap, software-defined, jam-resistant mass, exactly the segment the United States is least able to produce at volume. Tracked in Signal No. 81.
Sources: US Army · Helsing · Axios.
First reported in Signal No. 81, 12 June 2026.