Discounted anti-drone weapon could be ready next year

A low-cost weapon capable of shooting down multiple drones at once by disrupting their electronics could be available as early as next year, the head of the company leading development for the UK has said.

Alex Cresswell, chief executive officer of Thales UK, said the new radio frequency directed energy weapon (RFDEW), which is being field tested with the British Army over the summer, should be ready for use ” fast enough “.

“Going from something that works in real life on Salisbury Plain to something you would send to Ukraine is still a big step. It’s a leap of a year, but not of several years,” Cresswell said in an interview with the Financial Times.

“Could the system we demonstrated be available for someone to [as early as next year]? Yes, of course it is possible,” he added.

Thales UK, the British subsidiary of the French defense and technology group, is leading the development of this weapon within an industrial consortium under contract with the Ministry of Defense. The decision on when and where to deploy the system would be up to the UK government.

Priced at just 10 pence (20.6 cents) per use and with a range of up to 1 km, the system will provide a cheaper alternative to traditional anti-missile air defense systems, which typically cost more than hundreds of thousands of dollars .

The technology can be mounted on military vehicles and uses a mobile power source to produce radio frequency waves or pulses to interfere with the electronics of a moving target.

The industry, Cresswell said, has been working on countermeasures against inbound attacks for decades. However, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, both sides have relied heavily on drones to attack from the sky, prompting governments and industry to invest in ways to counter such attacks .

What people are trying to look for, he added, are weapons that are “much more cost-effective for the combat mass that they provide.”

Thales, of which the French government is the main investor, generated 18.4 billion euros (NZ$38 billion) in turnover in 2023 and is recruiting heavily around the world.

In the UK, where the company employs more than 7,000 people, sales have increased by 20% over the past two years to just over £1.1 billion by the end of 2023.

Cresswell said he expected UK sales to rise another 10 per cent this year, with the company benefiting from higher government orders.

It manufactures missiles and launchers at two sites in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and also supplies sonar systems for the Royal Navy's nuclear submarines.

Missiles manufactured in Belfast were supplied to Ukraine, via the British Ministry of Defence.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine not only depleted governments' weapons stockpiles, but also highlighted that most were too small to cope with a long and intense conflict.

Production at the Belfast facility, where Thales builds the Starstreak short-range air defense system and assembles the Saab NLAW anti-tank system, has doubled in the past 18 months to its highest level in two decades.

Cresswell said Thales planned to further double its production over the next two years to meet demand.

There has been a “seismic shift” in the way weapons and munitions are procured, with “much greater focus on resilience, capacity and scalability,” a- he declared.

Written by: Sylvia Pfeifer in London

© Financial Times