Forget Jet Packs: Marines Will Soon Fly Powered Paragliders Into Battle
The Marine Corps is taking a novel approach to the US military's decades-long pursuit of individual lift.
Editor’s note: This another brief digression under this newsletter’s stated mission to cover not just lasers, but other futuristic defense technology. Have feedback? Drop me a line.
The US military may have shelved its fantasy of jet pack infantry, but the dream of getting individual troops to fly isn’t dead — it just looks a bit stranger than expected.
The US Marine Corps is evaluating powered paragliders — essentially personal, motorized, fabric-wing aircraft — to rapidly move individual Marines over long distances and insert them into contested environments without the noise or radar signature of a conventional fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft. Dubbed the Augmented Parachute System-1 (APS-1), the new platform is directly aligned with Force Design 2030, the service’s sweeping strategic overhaul designed to create smaller, more agile expeditionary units that can fight with enhanced range and lethality in distributed high-intensity future conflict.
In practical terms, the APS-1 is the service’s answer to a problem that helicopters and transport aircraft can no longer solve: how to move Marines across a battlespace saturated with sensors and precision strike capabilities without immediately getting blown to pieces. If large aircraft can no longer reliably deliver small units, then military planners need something quieter, smaller, and disposable — and powered paragliders fit that bill.1
“The APS-1 will provide Marines with a powered parachute capability enabling extended glide distances,” a Marine Corps Systems Command (MARCORSYSCOM) spokesman told Laser Wars in an email. “The system is intended for employment across Fleet Marine Force formations to support a range of expeditionary mission sets, including reconnaissance.”
The Marine Corps has been actively pursuing powered paraglider capabilities since at least 2020. The service awarded Massachusetts-based defense contractor Triton Systems a $250,000 Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) Phase I contract in 2021 for work on its ‘Powered Paraglider with Increased Capabilities’ project, followed by a $1 million Phase II contract in 2022, according to SBIR data. As of September, the company has started work on additional powered paraglider R&D under another $1.5 million Phase II contract to “continue the testing and improvement” of the APS-1. (MARCORSYSCOM confirmed that Triton is the prime contractor on the effort.)
Triton’s APS-1 solution consists of a specialized paraglider canopy and a back-worn two-stroke gas engine with a propellor ensemble enclosed in a protective cage, said Adam Young, the company’s air mobility director. The system can carry a fully kitted-out Marine and an additional 80 pounds of gear up to to 10,000 feet in the air with a range of between 160 to 200 miles.
“The general idea was a foot-launched system,” Young told Laser Wars in an interview. “Individual Marines at the unit level can have an air asset instead of depending on theater-level assets like helicopter that have high radar signatures and very large risk.”
Watch US Marines test a powered paraglider at Exercise Kaiju Rain:
The Marine Corps’ work with Triton appears headed for a formal program of record. Budget documents show that the service spent $2.658 million on an initial procurement of APS-1 systems in fiscal year 2025 and requested $2.693 million for fiscal year 2026 for more. MARCORSYSCOM confirmed that the service currently plans on transitioning APS-1 to a program of record in fiscal year 2026 with an approved acquisition objective of 376 systems. The system’s initial operational capability is slated for sometime in fiscal year 2027, according to a 2024 MARADMIN, which notes that some Marine units “have already purchased [powered paragliders], are conducting contracted courses, and are executing training with this capability.”
It’s unclear how many powered paragliders the Corps currently possesses, but Marines are apparently making good use of them already. In May 2024, Marine special operators took to the skies above Tampa, Florida in powered paragliders (including “earlier versions” of Triton’s APS-1 solution, Young said) for a mock drone hunt as part of a capabilities demonstration during the annual Special Operations Forces Week conference. As recently as this past April, Marines were actively testing similar systems during Exercise Kaiju Rain 25 in Okinawa, Japan, although Triton’s solution was not involved.
As I previously reported, US military planners have been fixated on making troops fly ever since beloved science fiction adventurer Buck Rogers’ antigravity “jump belt” popularized the concept in the 1920s. From the Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee “Flying Platform” of the 1950s to the Marine Corps’ two-man “flying Jeep” Small Tactical Aerial Mobility Platform of 1970s, militarized “individual lift” concepts have come and gone, but perhaps none captured the national imagination as much as Bell Aerosystems’ Small Rocket Lift Device (or, colloquially, the “Rocket Belt”) that engineer Harold Graham famously demonstrated for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg in North Carolina in October 1961. While the US Army scrapped development of the Rocket Belt due to noise and fuel constraints, the system firmly embedded the idea of jet pack troops in the consciousness of both military planners and the American public.2
The jet pack “presents a small, fast target, capable of evasive maneuvers,” according to a 1967 Bell report on the potential applications of its proposed Light Mobility System (LMS) individual lift device, capabilities that make the system ideal for missions ranging from reconnaissance and resupply to assault and even aerial fire support. To wit, mockups from the report envisioned American troops rapidly deploying onto beaches from offshore warships and conducting hit-and-run raids above forested or jungle terrain.3 “It’s versatility and responsiveness would enable unit commanders to utilize the unique capabilities of the LMS in virtually all combat environments,” the report concluded.
Even with the Pentagon’s (and America’s) fixation on jet packs, their tactical appeal has all but disappeared in recent years. US military planners have essentially concluded that jet packs, despite their purportedly superior airborne agility and maneuverability, remain too conspicuous and cumbersome to prove tactically effective in a high-intensity conflict. “In every depiction of the system, flying soldiers are terribly exposed to enemy fire,” as Kyle Mizokami put it in Popular Mechanics in 2018 on the LMS report. “Bell did this to show the jetpack’s relevance to the battlefield on the ground, but by doing so it emphasized LMS’ weakness, showing jetpack soldiers as easy targets silhouetted against a blue sky. In a real war, soldiers with LMS would be the first ones to get shot at, negating any advantage of the platform.”
Despite decades of false starts, the underlying military appetite for an individual lift capability never totally vanished. Powered paragliders, once the domain of hobbyists and thrill-seekers, have quietly become the most practical expression of that ambition.
Indeed, other corners of the Pentagon beyond the Marine Corps have been flirting with powered paragliders in recent years. As I previously reported, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was actively assessing paraglider-based prototype flight kits from five different companies (including Triton) under Phase II of its Portable Personal Air Mobility System (PPAMS) program as of April 2024. Although PPAMS initially garnered major attention following its 2021 launch due to DARPA’s stated interest in jet packs as a potential solution, the agency has subsequently narrowed its focus to all-electric systems. Today, PPAMS is focused on a quieter and more compact system to transport troops over shorter distances compared to APS-1, Young said, although learnings from both initiatives have “fed into” each other.
More recently, the Army also revealed it was exploring a “militarized powered paraglider” platform under its Personnel Air Mobility System (PAMS) initiative which, publicly unveiled in August 2024, seeks to “provide unit organic personnel air mobility to support freedom of movement in contested environments.” Although the service’s fiscal year 2026 budget request did not contain explicit funding lines for the initiative, it did include a $2.5 million congressional addition for R&D for a “personal air mobility capability.” Whether that initiative ever actually gets off the ground remains to be seen: according to Young, the service currently appears more focused on cargo delivery systems like the Joint Precision Airdrop System (JPADS) at the moment rather than individual air mobility systems.
As the US military reorients itself ahead of a future conflict with China, the appeal of powered paragliders is understandable. Beijing’s robust anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities have made conventional air mobility increasingly suicidal, and powered paragliders like APS-1 offers a relatively stealthy way to move Marines through contested airspace without lighting up the enemy’s kill chain.
This doesn’t mean powered paragliders are a miracle capability: they’re weather-dependent, vulnerable to small arms, and relatively light in payload capacity (and despite their stealth advantages, “low signature” does not mean “invisible.”) But when it comes to certain mission sets like reconnaissance, surveillance, and troop infiltration and exfiltration, these platforms appear to offer significant advantages over traditional air assets.
What’s particularly striking across the Marine Corps’ APS-1 effort, DARPA’s PPAMS work, and the Army’s PAMS initiative is that all three appear to have converged on the same idea: air mobility doesn’t need to be a primarily operational-level capability anymore. The Pentagon is treating aerial movement as an individual warfighter function rather than something that requires a pilot, a flight crew, or a swarm of maintainers. If the APS-1 and its cousins mature as hoped, the US military will have built something it has never had before: a cheap, repeatable, low-signature way to rapidly deploy human operators across a battlespace that has grown too deadly for conventional aircraft.
The Pentagon has been promising troops the gift of individual lift for decades. Now it may finally deliver by handing them a lawnmower engine and a parachute.
It’s worth noting that North Korean special operations forces have been training to attack the top US-South Korean military command in Seoul with paragliders for years, as Yonhap News Agency reported back in 2017. More recently, an unknown number Hamas militants used powered paragliders to infiltrate Israel during the October 7, 2023 terror attacks, Reuters reported. Two years later, Myanmar’s military government used similar systems to bomb a Buddhist festival amid the country’s ongoing civil war, according to BBC News.
An appearance at the first-ever Super Bowl halftime show in January 1967 certainly helped.
Bell’s LMS report arrived at the height of the Vietnam War.
‘’Novel’’ idea? Seems that they copied it from Hamas’ attack on Israel. Not exactly a new idea…. Just one that worked.
Hopefully none of their enemies will use shotguns. 😁