Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has inflamed geopolitical tensions, galvanised NATO and led to a surge in military spending as the West seeks to bolster its defences.
While some spending is funding acquisition of traditional armaments like fighter jets and precision missiles, the ongoing war has also shown need for new classes of weapon systems – some that had been largely ignored before the conflict.
These include simple air defences capable of countering large numbers of small unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and long-endurance airborne platforms designed to defend friendly forces and rapidly strike encroaching enemy troops.
Several manufacturers foresaw the battlefield value of such technologies during previous conflicts and spent years investing in such systems prior to war breaking out in Ukraine. Those developers now stand to benefit from heightened interest in systems previously used mostly in niche circumstances.
DRONE DEFENCE
Large UAS, such as General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ MQ-9 Reaper and Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4 Global Hawk, have been part of the modern battlefield for nearly two decades. Pioneered by the US military, these remotely piloted aircraft can reach the same altitudes as conventional fixed-wing craft and boast payloads exceeding 1,000kg (2,200lb).
They can also be targeted by conventional air defence systems.
But the war in Ukraine has proven the effectiveness of smaller unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as the Baykar Bayraktar TB2 from Turkey. Such cheaper and simpler craft can be fielded in large numbers to deliver lethal strikes and provide crucial reconnaissance, including for directing artillery fire. The former head of US Special Operations Command in 2022 described small UAVs as having the power to disrupt the global military order.
Fighters on both sides of the Ukraine conflict have also made extensive use of commercially available quadcopter drones – both for battlefield surveillance and modified to deliver unguided gravity munitions.
The effectiveness of such tactics revealed a gap in modern air defences, which are designed to engage large targets like manned fighters and cruise missiles using powerful guided missiles that can each cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – even millions.
“There is a gap in that five-to-ten-kilometre range,” says Luke Savoie, president of L3Harris’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance business. Within that “grey zone”, existing systems are not particularly effective at combating threats posed by aircraft ranging in size from small hobbyist drones to medium-size UAVs, he says.
Several years before the war in Ukraine, L3Harris began designing a system to defend against such targets – a response by the company to conditions experienced by its contractors embedded with Western special forces in Syria and elsewhere across the Middle East.
The company unveiled its design – the Vampire counter-UAS (CUAS) platform – in 2022 at the conference now called Special Operations Forces (SOF) Week. Three months later, the Pentagon announced it was sending the Vampire to Ukraine.
The system pairs a ground version of L3Harris’s MX-10 electro-optical/infrared sensor with a small rocket launcher that can be mounted on almost any vehicle, including commercial pick-up trucks. It fires cheap, readily available Hydra 70mm (2.75in) rockets equipped with proximity fuses – which operators guide to targets using the sensors.
“[There’s] nothing you can do to defend against it,” says Savoie, who spoke with FlightGlobal at the 2023 SOF Week event in Tampa, Florida on 11 May. “You’re not dependent on heat signature. You’re not dependent on electronic warfare or radar… If you see it, it’s dead.”
L3Harris developed the Vampire, Savoie says, to help special-operations troops operating in far-flung locales like Syria or Africa counter threats from small UAVs.
“It used to be a SOF problem, in terms of experiencing it in austere forward operating bases,” he notes. “But adversaries learned to expand their tactics.
“Things like what’s happening in Ukraine just massively accelerate the implementation of those tactics by an adversary,” he adds.
CUAS is among the hottest fields in the defence industry, with manufacturers pitching systems ranging from advanced directed-energy laser weapons to hand-carried jamming “rifles” capable of disrupting quadcopters.
L3Harris’s early movement in the space appears to be paying off. In January, the company won a $40 million contract with the Pentagon to provide 14 Vampire systems to Ukraine by the end of 2023.
LOITERING ENCOURAGED
While L3Harris was developing ways to shoot down small UAVs, other defence producers were seeking to maximise the lethal power of such platforms.
While battling insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, American forces faced continual threat from homemade explosives buried alongside roads and foot paths. Insurgents placed these improvised explosive devices alone or in small teams, often at night.
While hostile fighters might be observed using airborne reconnaissance assets – such as AeroVironment’s Puma and Raven – those small UAVs were unarmed.
“There was a need…[to] respond to this quickly,” Brett Hush, general manager of tactical missile systems at AeroVironment, tells FlightGlobal.
The result is what is now known as loitering munitions.
Essentially UAVs equipped with explosive warheads, loitering munitions like AeroVironment’s Switchblade are both surveillance and precision-weapons platforms.
The vehicle is launched from a small tube, after which it deploys a wing and electric propeller system to stay aloft. When a target is identified, a human operator initiates the strike, sending the loitering munition into a suicide dive at its target.
This has given rise to the type’s unofficial moniker: kamikaze drone.
Hush says AeroVironment’s early Switchblade models were deployed to Afghanistan with US Army special forces.
They proved particularly effective at helping the US army spot and kill Taliban fire teams lobbing mortars and rockets into NATO’s sprawling bases. Previously, even after being identified, enemy fire teams might have 15-20min to escape before the US army could respond, Hush says. “This was happening on a regular basis.”
But loitering munitions like Switchblade let the army strike back almost immediately.
The technology was considered so effective that the Pentagon even restricted its export to overseas allies. UAVs of all types are some of the most-heavily restricted defence articles under US government rules.
“Many allies had been denied,” Hush says, noting some were countries cleared to purchase the highly-sensitive Lockheed Martin F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighter.
It came as no surprise to anyone at AeroVironment when Washington announced it was sending Switchblade 300s to Ukraine. The Pentagon included 100 of the loitering munitions in one of the USA’s earliest military assistance packages to Kyiv in March 2022.
By summer, that number had increased to more than 700 Switchblade 300s, including those transferred from Pentagon stocks and those from orders placed after the war began.
Another 100 of the more-capable Switchblade 600s have also been sent to support Ukraine.
The evolution of loitering munitions from niche counter-insurgency weapons used by special-operations forces to deployment on large-scale conventional battlefields has been long in the making.
Hush notes the Switchblade’s first combat employment came in 2011.
The transition began with the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which saw the heavy use of small UAVs. The trend accelerated with the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Hush predicts substantial innovation over the coming years, including development of new rotor configurations, further endurance and more range.
He notes AeroVironment quickly began developing means to subvert Russian electronic countermeasures designed to subvert loitering munitions, based on battlefield feedback from Ukraine.
“Dealing with the countermeasures is a constant game of learning, adapting and trying again,” Hush says. “There were things that we were able to change, mostly in software, to make them more resilient.”
Ultimately, Hush envisions loitering munitions becoming another tool with which ground commanders can solve particular battlefield problems.
He notes systems like Switchblade are unique in their ability to engage human-sized targets with precision and at ranges of “tens of kilometres” – while being lightweight enough to be carried by a single soldier.
While the US Army is still developing an acquisition programme for loitering munitions, the US Marine Corps (USMC) is moving ahead with procurement.
USMC commandant General David Berger has expressed enthusiasm about the concept.
“It’s incredibly frustrating to know there’s a loitering munition above your head,” Berger said at a 2022 USMC event in Washington DC. “There’s a psychological impact.”
That effect is being felt viscerally in Ukraine, where cities and civilian centres have been repeatedly targeted by Iranian Shahed-136 suicide UAVs operated by Russia.
While current systems operated by the USA still incorporate human operators to confirm targets and initiate strikes, Hush says “higher levels of autonomy” are at the top of Pentagon wish lists.
Approval of artificial intelligence-powered lethal strikes will almost certainly be fraught with ethical, legal and political concern, but Hush notes such capability already exists.
“The technology is here now,” he says. “We’ve demonstrated, on government ranges, automatic target recognition.”
