It was employed for over a month to observe areas within Morton County where numerous instances of criminal trespass and mischief had occurred.

While Stingers are usually loaded with direct impact warheads for use against aircraft and cruise missiles, these were equipped with proximity fuzes that enabled them to detonate near the target, giving them the ability to destroy small UAVs.

Since small UAVs do not produce large heat signatures, the Avenger uses a laser rangefinder in combination with an antenna on the warhead to direct the missile on target.

The Stingers shot down an MQM-170C Outlaw and a smaller, unidentified system, demonstrating the fuze's ability to detect and destroy moving mini-drones weighing as little as 2–20 kg (4.4–44.1 lb).

[14][15][16] On 30 September 2020, the U.S. Army awarded General Dynamics a contract to deliver the Interim Maneuver SHORAD (IM-SHORAD), a Stryker armored vehicle fitted with heavier weapons to replace the outdated, unarmored, and undergunned Avenger Humvee.

[3] The Avenger can be linked to the Forward Area Air Defense Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (FAAD C3I) system, which permits external radar tracks and messages to be passed to the fire unit to alert and cue the gunner.

This allowed for the removal of the turret's cab safety limits which enabled the gun to be fired directly in front of the HMMWV.

Boeing teamed with Shorts Brothers PLC (now part of Thales) to offer an Avenger system in which one Stinger pod was replaced with a pod of four Starstreak Hyper-velocity laser-guided missiles, in the hopes of attracting a U.S. Army contract under the Forward Area Air Defense System Line-of-Sight Rear (FAADS-LOS-R) program.

Test installation was carried out in mid-1990 and firing trials followed from mid-1991 in the U.K. Starstreak would have complemented the Stinger by improving the overall systems ability to deal with low hovering helicopters which frequently do not provide enough contrast for lock-on by infrared guided missiles.

[25] The FLIR/laser rangefinder combined with the 12.7 mm (.50) cal machine gun has proved to be very effective, but was limited by no-fire zones, particularly to the front of the vehicle.

[26] A program was instituted to remove one of the missile pods and move the machine gun to that position to enable a 360° field of fire.

[31] In August 2014, the system successfully intercepted a UAV and cruise missile target featuring a semi-active radar homing seeker in a test.

In March 2017, Boeing revealed a modernized Avenger system fitted with AIM-9X Sidewinder and Longbow Hellfire missiles on the sides and a directed energy weapon affixed to the top.

[33] While Boeing had configured a Stryker with the Avenger turret to fulfill the Army's Interim Maneuver-Short-Range Air Defense (IM-SHORAD) requirement, the Army ultimately decided against the idea, feeling it would require major modifications to the vehicle and because of the company's desire for the service to supply the turrets, of which there were a limited amount existing readily in the inventory.

[34] During a 2017 joint French-Egyptian naval exercise, an AN/TWQ-1 Avenger was mounted onto the helicopter flight deck of a Mistral-class amphibious assault ship to provide ad-hoc close-range air defense.