Some maritime special operators are getting a robotic turret that can turn machine guns into an autonomous drone-killer for boats and other vehicles.
U.S. Special Operations Command awarded defense tech startup Allen Control Systems a contract—value and quantity undisclosed—for its Bullfrog autonomous turret, the company announced Friday. The contract will be executed by ManTech, an established defense contractor.
Bullfrog is equipped with sensors and AI to spot and engage incoming drones in groups 1, 2, and 3, and can be armed with an M240, M2, M230, and M134 guns or non-kinetic weapons such as a laser dazzler.
Allen Control Systems president Steve Simoni, a former Navy nuclear engineer, said U.S. forces need more autonomous defenses against drones.
“We are a little behind. All of our weapons systems need to be enhanced with some form of additional autonomy,” Simoni said at Axios’ AI event last week. “In China, they are manufacturing drones at an unprecedented rate, and these things are incredibly lethal …and they fly very fast, and they can take out million-dollar pieces of artillery. They can crush tanks like never before, and it’s a massive problem, and so we need an autonomy stack across different sorts of products to neutralize this threat. And I think right now, as you’re seeing on the battlefield in Ukraine, there’s really not a good solution for it yet.”
Special operators are often quick to try, buy, and integrate new technologies—an increasingly popular model for how the Pentagon handles acquisitions more broadly. And, much like the Marine Corps and Army, SOCOM is embracing drone tech and autonomous systems.
The goal is to “get to a point where we can basically have something on a vehicle, let’s say it’s counter-UAS, and we can just send it to a point and have it do its mission,” said Vincent Grizio, a program manager for vehicles for the Special Operations Forces Warrior program office, National Defense magazine reported in June.
Drones are an increasing threat on and off the battlefield, driving demand for solutions that can disable them and pushing military units to shift how they handle the threat, as well as the tech they buy. Just this week, drones closed Danish airports and disrupted military base operations for several hours.
Simoni said the tech also allows the military to take down drones at a lower cost by using common arms such as the M240.
“Any country or clandestine group can now wage an effective war. It used to be expensive for a country to wage war, but now, with the rise of the drone, it’s just, it’s very easy to be disruptive,” he said. “Ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 for these small [first-person view] drones, interceptor missiles just really don’t make any sense. And right now, what we’re doing, we’re invested in a lot of electronic warfare, like I mentioned. And then the other thing we invest in as a military is interceptors. The US military—we have some of the best interceptors in the world—but they’re more expensive than the drone, and so that’s just not going to be long-term sustainable.”
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