LONDON — Future air defense for naval vessels and combat armor may include a defensive escort of uncrewed vehicles equipped with electronic warfare measures or drone-killing cannons, according to the technology director at BAE Systems, Europe’s largest defense company.
The logic follows lessons learned from recent naval engagements that dance around the sweet spot of hitting targets from a safe distance, with sufficient reliability, while spending as little on interceptions as possible.
Relatively inexpensive drone countermeasures already fielded, such as electronic warfare or cannon fire, tend to be shorter range or have lower success rates, Robert Merryweather, group technology director at BAE, noted at a briefing on layered drone and missile defense at the DSEI UK show here.
The solution may be to push them out to be a first line of defense, with more expensive high-end systems as a backstop, he said.
The cost asymmetry of defending against drones has been an issue for Western warships protecting shipping in the Red Sea, with navies initially using million-dollar, surface-to-air missiles to destroy Houthi drones, before changing doctrine to allow some UAVs to close in to the range of onboard cannons and EW measures.
“The cost per shot of your electronic warfare is lowest, but also probably your confidence of success is lowest, and also the range is shortest,” Merryweather said. “At the moment, the exquisite thing works furthest, so you’ve got to use that one first and that isn’t workable in terms of an attritional situation.”
Armed forces currently face the “horrendous decision” of whether they allow a drone threat to approach within the range of electronic warfare, which has the lowest probability of success but is the most sustainable capability, compared to expensive missiles, according to the executive.
The French Navy installed electro-optical sensors on its frigates to identify threats at greater distances, giving crews the option to allow threats to approach within range of the onboard cannon rather than using an Aster missile.
One solution may be uncrewed vessels or vehicles equipped with electronic warfare capabilities or 40-millimeter cannons with airburst shells, operating at distance from a frigate or tank to tackle threats before they get too close, according to Merryweather.
For electronic warfare, which has maybe a 1-kilometer range, “we can start to mount that EW warfare on drones, we can project it forward, we can then deploy that effect in advance of the kinetic fallbacks,” Merryweather said.
For a 40-millimeter cannon with an effective range of about 4 kilometers, “you’ve got to let the threat get relatively close before that layer of the system can become on board, unless of course you can project that effect further forwards and start to push that upstream of the threat, which is certainly things that we are looking at in the maritime domain.”
Low-cost drone defense systems might be pushed out 15 kilometers from a naval ship for maximum use, though even three or four kilometers “is still better than we have today.”
The Type 26 frigates being built for the Royal Navy will have a mission bay that could carry several unmanned surface vessels big enough to mount a 40-mm cannon, as well as USVs equipped with EW which could be deployed for high-risk parts of a mission, according to Merryweather.
Meanwhile, in the land domain, one of the first use cases for BAE’s autonomous, eight-wheeled ground vehicle Atlas might be in the forward-deployed air defense role, the technology director said.
The concept of forward-deployed air defense may be easier to deploy in the land domain, “because you’ve got more flexibility over your force mix,” Merryweather said. “If you’re in the naval domain and you’re sailing through the Gulf, you need to have decided before you left Portsmouth, largely speaking, what you want to have with you.”
Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.