Nov. 22, 2025
By Mark Stiner
Elbit America Vice President, Corporate Business Development
Modern conflict is teaching a hard lesson: In wars of attrition, the combination of affordability and precision wins. We can no longer afford to choose between filling stockpiles and buying munitions that actually hit what commanders need destroyed. The battlefield demands weapons that are smart enough to find fleeting, moving, or poorly localized targets — and affordable to buy in the quantities required to sustain long campaigns.
That is precisely the operating space for Elbit America’s newest Lonestar seeker: a rugged, production-ready design that combines semi-active laser homing with an embedded infrared (IR) camera and the on-board processing to make AI-enabled targeting practical at scale.
Proven pedigree, production-ready
Elbit America’s Lonestar line has a long and public pedigree. Our strapdown laser seekers have been proven on multiple weapon families. Those programs are not prototypes. We produce these operational, widely deployed capabilities in volume at our Fort Worth, Texas facility.
How multi-mode sensing wins
What distinguishes the newest Lonestar is the deliberate merging of two sensing modalities that used to be separate: laser homing for precision cueing, and an imaging IR channel that expands capability when laser designation is unavailable, ineffective, or actively countered.
This multi-mode approach is a force multiplier for several reasons.
- First, the IR camera enables passive acquisition and tracking of a heat signature. This allows prosecution of hard targets that attempt to defeat laser guidance with rapid beam-jamming or obscuration.
- Second, the imaging channel supports image-based navigation and terminal guidance in GPS-denied environments. A weapon can correlate scene features to stored maps or to sensor cues from off-board platforms to home on a target even when satellite navigation is degraded.
- Third, the seeker’s processing can host AI-based target recognition algorithms to discriminate among potential aimpoints, pinpoint and track moving targets, and reduce the time from detection to effect.
- The processing to communicate as a swarm of weapons is done “at the edge” meaning on board the individual system thus enabling a collaborative environment.
Integrating a Lonestar multi-mode seeker into a family of munitions or missiles makes those weapons far more adaptable across the full spectrum of conflict. Lonestar seekers enable smart weapons to operate in contested electromagnetic environments, prosecute mobile high-value targets, and survive countermeasures that previously forced either mission aborts or inefficient mass fires. The result is a lower cost per kill and shorter sensor-to-shooter cycles for the fleet.
Built for scale: manufacturing that makes precision affordable
Affordability is not an accident. For more than a decade Elbit America has refined manufacturing processes, supply-chain resilience, and production lines that convert sophisticated optics and avionics into durable, field-serviceable seekers that can be delivered on schedule. We have delivered thousands of fielded seekers, underscoring that we understand what it takes to produce precision hardware in volume without sacrificing reliability. Put simply: We know how to make the “eyes” of a weapon in the quantities the nation needs.
Operationally, the benefits are immediate. In a typical contested fight, space-based and forward terrestrial sensors may only get a fleeting glimpse of an adversary launcher before it moves. A Lonestar-equipped weapon launched to a predicted aimpoint can loiter, use its infrared channel to refine the cue, apply onboard recognition algorithms to verify the target, and then prosecute the strike — all without an enduring GPS fix or a continuous laser designation. If the laser is briefly available, the seeker can still use laser homing for terminal accuracy. If designation is unavailable, the IR channel and image processing carry the mission forward. This kind of graceful degradation — the ability to work with whatever sensor picture is available — is what separates useful precision from boutique capability.
Designed for the contested fight
The future of targeting will include more autonomy, more distributed sensing, and more contested environments. Lonestar is built for that future: strapdown (no gimbals), modular, and designed to accept new processing algorithms and sensor fusion techniques as they mature. That makes it a sensible, low-risk way to upgrade existing weapon families for 21st-century fight conditions while minimizing cost and acquisition timelines.
We are at a strategic juncture. Future battlefields will reward adaptability and punish rigidity. Lonestar multi-mode seekers offer customers weapons that remain lethal against moving, fleeting, and GPS-denied targets — and do so in quantities that matter. That is how you turn precision into persistence, and persistence into deterrence. Elbit America is committed to that path: building the sensing technologies that make precision both smart and affordable, and producing them at the scale our warfighters require. When the end game is critical, experience matters.
Learn more: https://www.elbitamerica.com/precision-fires#seekers.