U.S. soldiers deployed to Europe had a busy November testing out counter-drone systems that the service hopes to get into the hands of more NATO allies, as well as with units and allies as far away as the Indo-Pacific.
First Polish, Romanian, and American troops trained together Nov. 18 in Poland on Merops, an AI-enabled, pickup-truck-transportable system that identifies enemy drones, then launches a cheap fixed-wing drone to ram them. At the same time, the Army held Operation Flytrap 4.5 in Germany, a competition of 20 cUAS contenders in a competition for one of four $350,000 prizes.
“It also demonstrated our capability, just as Flytrap did, to integrate with industry, to move very quickly to employ a capability that’s lethal,” Brig. Gen. Curt King, who leads the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command in Germany, told reporters Tuesday. “It can defeat the Shahed-type threats, but also it demonstrates our ability to place capabilities that are much cheaper than some of our other previous systems that we’ve been using to date, to ensure that we are able to build the capacity against the drone threats that could be placed into the air.”
The U.S. has been using air defense systems to shoot down drones, with missiles that cost millions of dollars each. A Merops interceptor drone costs about $15,000, about half the price of the Shaheds that Ukrainians have been shooting down with it.
“The other thing that we demonstrated with Flytrap, and that Ukraine has shown us … is the technology is rapidly evolving so that we can get to enhanced decision aids and autonomy, which Ukraine has been rapidly developing, so that I don’t need 10 soldiers to do a function,” King said.
Both events included the team from the Global Tactical Edge Acquisition Directorate, a nascent procurement system that plans to create a marketplace where units can buy the systems that are vetted and approved through events like Project Flytrap.
“We’re not just stopping with the counter-UAS fight,” Col. Christopher Hill, senior director of the GTEAD, told reporters. “Next up on the list is ground autonomy and ground launched effects, as I mentioned earlier, the offensive systems that we’re going to use to create a dilemma for our adversaries. Then we’re going to move to air autonomy and air-launched effects—again, another offensive system to provide a dilemma.”
The team is expanding to Indo-Pacific Command early next year, Hill said.
“We’re going to replicate the same processes there in the Pacific region, in order to not only support our U.S. unit there, but also our international partners in Australia, in South Korea and in Japan, and other partners there in the region,” he said.
Beyond demonstrations, GTEAD plans to have soldiers lead assessments and give feedback so that systems can be tweaked and then put on the marketplace.
“On the back end of these demonstrations, be prepared, from an acquisition standpoint, to actually put dollars towards these capabilities and give these companies something to look forward to from a contract standpoint,” he said.
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