The BAI Aerosystems (BAIA) BQM-147 Dragon unmanned aerial vehicle is a tactical battlefield UAV operated by the United States Marine Corps.

[1] The Dragon began life in 1986, when the US Marines Corps contracted with the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), an offshoot of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, that works on government technology development contracts, to build a small piston-powered UAV as an "expendable jammer" for battlefield electronics warfare.

However, APL wasn't able to meet the schedule requested by the Marines for fielding the Exdrone, and so the program was passed on to BAI Aerosystems, with the Navy assisting by developing a video imaging system for tactical reconnaissance.

The NASA Langley Flight Research Center also assisted in the development effort, performing wind-tunnel tests and making recommendations for aerodynamic improvements, and after these changes the BQM-147A Exdrone went into service with the Marines in time to help them chase the Iraqis out of Kuwait City.

A few years later, the UAV-JPO also bought several hundred Exdrones for demonstrations and training to help get tactical officers in tune with battlefield UAV capabilities.

BAI renamed the UAV since the Exdrone wasn't really all that expendable, given that it carried a reasonably sophisticated sensor system and flight avionics.

Not only is this approach unsuited to smaller vessels, it is also not particularly reliable even on large vessels, with catapult launches causing drone damage, catapult failures leading to loss of the drone, and recoveries similarly leading to damage through collisions and unintended ditching.