Proteus positions Blue Spear for countries seeking commonality across armed services

A model of the Blue Spear at Singapore Airshow 2022. (Janes/Ridzwan Rahmat)

Proteus Advanced Systems is marketing its Blue Spear as a cross-deployable surface-to-surface missile for manpower-strained countries seeking greater commonality between units of its armed services.

In an interview with Janes on 28 March, Ron Tryfus, general manager of Proteus Advanced Systems, said how a number of developed countries are facing personnel shortages given the decline in their respective populations.

This constraint is making it more difficult to deploy different surface strike solutions across different branches of the armed forces, such as the navy and the coastal defence units of the army.

Proteus Advanced Systems is a joint-venture teaming between Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Singapore defence prime ST Engineering. The company is responsible for marketing the Blue Spear missiles to potential operators as a fifth-generation missile system.

Given its ability to be deployed both on land and naval platforms, countries deploying the Blue Spear missile are able to save on life-cycle maintenance, training costs, and time spent to familiarise its personnel with the weapon system, said Tryfus. Both sea- and land-based launch solutions for the Blue Spear can be tailored according to user requirements, he added.

The Blue Spear missile is derived from the Gabriel family of anti-ship missiles, which was developed by IAI in the 1960s. The subsonic, radar-guided weapon has a range of about 290 km and has beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) strike capabilities.