Design and capabilities
GNOM is a compact, ground-launched loitering munition developed by the Warsaw-based robotics firm Macro-System — a wheeled counterpart to an aerial kamikaze drone rather than a reconnaissance or logistics platform. Company president Mateusz Ciepliński has described its low, ground-hugging profile as making radio jamming largely ineffective against it in practice, since it typically operates too close to the ground for most jammers' effective coverage; in contested electromagnetic environments, the platform can also switch to fibre-optic tethered control with a range up to 5 kilometres. Note that a separate, unrelated Ukrainian platform made by Temerland is also called GNOM — a jamming-resistant wheeled kamikaze UGV with its own combat record and a reported 2,000-metre fibre-optic control range; this glossary entry covers the Polish Macro-System platform only.
Operational history
Macro-System first presented GNOM publicly on 22 July 2025 at Warsaw's Air Force Institute of Technology. On 17 September 2025, GNOM took part in the Iron Gate-25 tactical exercise with the Polish 18th Mechanized Division at the Land Forces Training Center in Orzysz, where it conducted reconnaissance, simulated kinetic strikes against armoured targets including a Rosomak armoured personnel carrier and a Ford Ranger, and staged mock command-post raids using fibre-optic guidance for precision control. On 24–25 April 2026, GNOM and its sibling platform GOBLIN were presented to Belgium's Land Component during a pilot field exercise at Leopoldsburg, run by the Belgian army's 5th Battalion, marking Macro-System's first confirmed deployment with a Western European military outside Poland.
AirVeto context
GNOM is a ground system with no airspace or wind-drift relevance of its own, mirroring its sibling platform GOBLIN already covered in this glossary. It is included as a companion entry for the same reason: Macro-System has tested both systems together at exercises directly tied to NATO's eastern-flank readiness posture, and readers researching Poland's ground-robotics buildup are likely to encounter GNOM and GOBLIN side by side in the same source material.