Vehicle protection

Missile incoming? The Army wants to jam its sensors

Defense contractor BAE is working on a system that protects Army vehicles from incoming missiles by scrambling their sensors and sending the projectiles off target.

Around 2015, the Army began to acknowledge that rather than using missiles to shoot down enemy missiles, other methods may be available to protect tanks and ground vehicles from such attacks. This led to the Modular Active Protection System program and in October an event dubbed a soft kill “rodeo,” a demonstration of non-kinetic technological countermeasures to protect vehicles.

The Army selected BAE to participate in follow-on efforts and to continue to work on the technology, which is essentially a sensor suite mounted to a ground vehicle that can detect incoming missiles and scramble sensors to send the missile off target.

Ryan Edwards, BAE’s business development manager for soldier and vehicle electronics, told C4ISRNET in a March 19 interview that its solution, called Raven, is autonomous, meaning soldiers do not need to cue the electronic countermeasures for incoming missiles. In addition, the non-kinetic nature of these systems can be safer than actual kinetic solutions because it doesn’t risk collateral damage, Edwards said.