The video, posted by OSINTtechnical on X, shows the VAMPIRE system mounted on a mobile platform launching an APKWS rocket that successfully intercepted a Shahed drone over Kyiv or another Ukrainian city, confirming the system’s operational use in combat.
Each APKWS rocket costs roughly $22,000, less than half the $50,000 price tag of a Shahed‑136 drone, and a fraction of the $2 million price of a Patriot missile typically employed for such threats, underscoring a potential shift in the economics of drone warfare.
L3Harris, the U.S. defense contractor behind VAMPIRE, has positioned the system as a modular, vehicle‑agnostic solution that can be rapidly deployed and paired with a variety of munitions, making it attractive to allies facing low‑cost, one‑way attack drones derived from the Iranian design.
The company’s corporate backdrop has been turbulent: last month its chief executive Christopher Kubasik was dismissed for conduct deemed inconsistent with company values, and interim CEO Sam Mehta has overseen a 16 % drop in L3Harris stock over the past month and a 35 % decline from its early‑year peak.
A recent Wall Street Journal profile noted that L3Harris shares have underperformed defense peers by more than 20 percentage points and trade at less than 16 times forward free cash flow, suggesting the stock may be undervalued relative to its growth prospects.
Adding to the VAMPIRE’s appeal, L3Harris secured a license last week for Shield AI’s Tracker Counter‑Unmanned Aircraft System (Tracker C‑UAS), an artificial‑intelligence package that scans electro‑optical/infrared spectra to detect, track and defeat unmanned aerial threats, making L3Harris the first company to integrate the technology.
Analysts cited in the WSJ piece calculate a price‑to‑free‑cash‑flow ratio of about 16.9x based on $2.7 billion of trailing free cash flow, versus a 24x price‑to‑earnings multiple, reinforcing the view that the stock could be trading below its fair value.