DARPA’S DRONE-​​KILLER

We’re not the only ones with drones. China, Russia, Iran, France — all sorts of ene­mies of free­dom have unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles, or UAVs. All in all, “some 32 nations are devel­op­ing or man­u­fac­tur­ing more than 250
mod­els” of drones, accord­ing to the Defense Department’s UAV Roadmap. So it’s only nat­u­rally that some­one in the Pentagon would be try­ing to fig­ure out a way to knock those UAVs out of the sky.
Darpa, the Defense Department’s way-​​out researchers, are look­ing to spend about $11 mil­lion over three years for their drone-​​killer, dubbed the Peregrine. From Darpa’s pro­posed bud­get for 2006:

The Peregrine UAV Killer pro­gram will develop a small, low-​​cost, high-​​endurance UAV, with a high dash speed, capa­ble of destroy­ing most enemy UAVs. Small UAVs with GPS guid­ance sys­tems have reached such a low cost level that expend­able UAV pro­grams are now emerg­ing and GPS capa­ble avion­ics are avail­able for the hobby mar­ket. Current options to counter such a threat, espe­cially at high alti­tude, involve expen­sive ground launched anti-​​air sys­tems or the expo­sure of manned inter­cep­tor air­craft. The Peregrine pro­gram will develop and demon­strate a UAV inter­cep­tor air­craft that will uti­lize a dual propul­sive power sys­tem to pro­vide very high endurance for the loi­ter and sur­veil­lance period, and a very high dash speed for inter­cept and kill…
Program Plans:
– Define sys­tem require­ments.
– Develop con­cept design.
– Demonstrate air­craft per­for­mance and kill capability.

March 23rd, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.