William Guyan, Senior Vice President, Business Development and President, Leonardo DRS International, speaks to Rebecca Spayne of Defence Buyer about UAS challenges.
The proliferation of unmanned aircraft has changed the air defence equation. For Leonardo DRS, the response begins with detection, but increasingly extends into questions of resilience, mobility, interoperability and how armed forces protect the systems designed to protect them.
What is the biggest change you are currently seeing in the defence market, particularly around drones and counter UAS?
I would say the biggest thing happening in defence worldwide is everything that has to do with drones. For DRS, that is primarily the technologies and capabilities related to counter drone or counter UAS.
Our RADA radar business is, I think, the world leader in the development, production and delivery of counter UAS radars. We have a very large number fielded around the world. They are combat proven, they are in use every day in Ukraine, they are part of the defence architecture of Israel, and they are employed on a large number of US and other allied platforms, both maritime and land, fixed and mobile.
The small form factor of the radar, combined with an affordable price point and the ability for the device to work on the move, means it can become a utility solution for many different radar architectures. For countries that do not already have systems, it provides an affordable way to start stitching together a radar defence network. For those that already have systems but have identified gaps, the radars can provide gap filling, resilience and additional depth.
How is the use of radar changing as forces look for greater resilience against increasingly persistent drone threats?
One of the newer trends is customers taking our radars and, instead of using them simply as a single point radar for local point defence, stitching them together into an integrated radar network. In Ukraine, for example, thousands of our radars have been used in this way to provide the same kind of picture of what is happening in the airspace that a larger, more expensive radar might be able to provide.
The benefit of that network approach is that, if you lose one of the radars, you do not lose the whole picture. Each radar is effectively creating a pixel of what becomes a mosaic of what is going on in the battlespace. If the enemy finds and destroys one radar, you have not lost the entire view, and it is not as expensive to replace.
What we have seen in Ukraine, in the conflicts Israel has faced and in the recent conflict with Iran is that large, fixed infrastructure can become a high-priority target. Drones provide a persistent ability to attack those assets. Even very capable infrastructure can be difficult to defend if an adversary continues sending drones until something gets through. So, we are seeing a requirement for more resilience. That can mean smaller radars behind larger systems, mobile systems that can fill a gap in real time, or additional radars protecting the larger, more expensive radars themselves. It is really defence for the defence systems.
