A US Army prototype of the Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. (US Army)
Leonardo DRS is unveiling a new top-down, short-range air defence (SHORAD) system for tactical vehicles to address threats posed by small unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and loitering munitions, which have gained prominence in ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
The yet-to-be named defensive system is designed to provide 360º coverage to detect and track top-down threats to tactical vehicles, Charlene Caputo, vice-president of business development at Leonardo DRS, told Janes .
Deployed aboard vehicles in an A-kit/B-kit configuration, the new open architecture system employs RADA radars and is based on a Leonardo DRS platform that is currently deployed downrange, Caputo said in October, ahead of the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) annual symposium in Washington, DC.
“I think the purpose of [the system] really is to have a low-cost option that you can take, [which] will extend force protection as it's traditionally been through the [SHORAD] effort,” she said, referring to the company's SHORAD family of systems.
The US Army set aside USD400.6 million for the procurement of Maneuver-SHORAD (M-SHORAD) Increment 1 in its fiscal year (FY) 2024 budget proposal. Service officials also called for USD100.6 million in research and development (R&D) funds for M-SHORAD Increment 2 in FY 2024.
Programme officials are currently evaluating kinetic and non-kinetic design alternatives for the system to be incorporated into the initial variant or into future iterations of the system, according to Caputo. “We're kind of open architecture agnostic, in terms of what the warfighter really needs,” she said, regarding what specific capabilities could be incorporated into a production variant of the new system.
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