Western defence companies and governments are redoubling their efforts to bring lower-cost weapons against cheap drones and missiles to the battlefield in the wake of Iranian attacks in the Gulf.
The race to find new ways of intercepting attack drones started in earnest after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago.
Expensive systems designed to provide defence against enemy aircraft and large missiles looked outdated in the new style of warfare, with drones proving devastatingly effective on both sides.
The war in the Middle East has reinforced this point, with Gulf states having to rely heavily on firing missiles from complex and costly air-defence systems such as the US Patriot to neutralise Iran’s Shahed drones, the same ones used by Russian forces in Ukraine.
“Relying a lot on fighter aircraft and using anti-air missiles to intercept [Iranian drones] is certainly not a cheap way to do this,” said Kelly Grieco, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a foreign affairs think-tank.
Taking Russia’s playbook from the invasion of Ukraine, Iran flooded the skies with its cheap Shahed drones to force the US, Israel and other countries to burn through expensive air defences.
Grieco estimates that for every $1 Iran spent on drones, the UAE spent at least 10 times as much on shooting them down using a mix of medium-range systems such as the US National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System.
Although Ukraine had been “on the front lines of this and been developing more lower-cost solutions”, what was notable was that the US had not “devoted sufficient resources to actually implement those solutions at scale”, said Grieco.
Experts have stressed that in the drone age, strategic advantage not only relies on technology but also on the ability to innovate quickly and manufacture at scale.
Ukraine has pioneered the use of mass-produced interceptor drones to counter Russia’s attacks, aided by several domestic technology start-ups. The war has also turbocharged investment into the defence tech sector more broadly.
Industry executives at four western start-ups said governments in the Middle East had been in touch about securing urgent supplies. The talks come after the Pentagon sought help from Ukrainian companies for their interceptor drones.
In the race for cheaper air defence options, most of the established contractors are investing across the spectrum to offer governments layers of protection at different ranges.
RTX, which builds the Patriot air defence system deployed in Ukraine and in the Middle East, recently demonstrated a new lower-cost version of its Coyote counter-drone system to the US Army.
Britain’s BAE Systems’ US-built APKWS kit, which transforms unguided 2.75-inch rockets into precision-guided munitions, is similarly regarded as a lower-cost alternative to larger guided missiles.
Feasibility studies have been under way to integrate the rockets with Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft, and a jet fighter was last week spotted returning from a test flight.
The difficulty for companies is the need to look beyond Ukraine and the Iran wars when placing bets on which technologies will emerge as winners.
“If you are trying to address this market from an industrial point of view you have to address what happens after Ukraine,” said Douglas Barrie, a military aerospace specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank.
Not all future conflicts would be spent dealing with one-way attack drones along a long, relatively “static” front line, he warned. The “difficulty is . . . the technologies that look like winners today might not look like winners in the future”.
Detection
Radar has been foundational to air defence for decades, offering different detection ranges. High-value radars integrated in air defence systems such as the Patriot have been in use in the Middle East.
Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system, designed specifically to deal with the shorter-range missiles fired from Gaza, has a multi-mission radar with a detection range of up to 470km for surveillance.
The drone war in Ukraine has sparked innovation for shorter-range alternatives.
With standard radar unable to detect the small low-flying Shahed drones, the country’s tech companies developed a nationwide system of acoustic sensors that could identify them by their sound signature.
A new breed of short-range radar companies has also emerged. Dutch-based start-up Robin Radar Systems started with bird detection but switched tack in 2014. The company has supplied its advanced IRIS 3D counter-drone radars to Ukraine for the past three years.
Siete Hamminga, chief executive, said the company was getting “a lot of inquiries at the moment from the affected countries in the Middle East”.
The company’s drones, which offer “last mile protection”, cost less than $1mn compared with “traditional air defence radars which can cost anything between $20mn and $50mn a piece”, according to Hamminga, although for comprehensive air defence a combination of long and short-range radars was needed.
Radars from another start-up, US-based Echodyne, are being used by several established players in Europe including Rheinmetall. The company, which counts Microsoft’s Bill Gates and UK fund manager Baillie Gifford among its backers, says its use of “metamaterials” — common materials designed in a special way — allows it to produce radars more cheaply than some comparable products.
Tom Driscoll, co-founder and chief technology officer, said in this era of autonomous platforms, cost was key. The “cost point between Echodyne radars and another radar that could solve the problem is typically about 10x in order of magnitude”.
Interceptor drones and missiles
As the test bed for lower-cost alternatives targeting attack drones, Ukraine has produced interceptor start-ups such as Wild Hornets. Several other companies have emerged in the space in recent years, including Munich-based Tytan Technologies, Britain’s Cambridge Aerospace and Latvia’s Origin Robotics.
Estonia’s Frankenburg Technologies is developing AI-guided interceptor missiles and says they will be “10 times more affordable” than traditional weapons.
Max Enders, Tytan’s head of business development and government affairs, believes air defence in the age of mass drone warfare favours the faster innovation cycles offered by start-ups.
“The sheer speed at which innovation takes place and the now hugely compressed development loop from battlefield to lab to deployment at scale . . . appears to privilege small and agile companies over legacy primes.”
Lasers and microwave technology
Among the most promising weapons, according to experts, are those using high-energy laser and microwave technology, long regarded as more science fiction than reality.
Some of the world’s best-known contractors, including RTX in the US and Europe’s MBDA, as well as Britain’s Qinetiq, are investing heavily in laser weapons. France’s Thales, meanwhile, is leading a consortium in the UK developing “RapidDestroyer” which uses a high-power radio frequency to disable or fry electronics in drones at a distance.
Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems said at the end of last year it had delivered its Iron Beam laser system to the Israel Defense Forces. The company described the equipment as a “fundamental shift in the defence equation — maximum precision, superior efficiency, negligible cost per interception”.
In the UK, the Ministry of Defence plans to deploy its DragonFire laser on Royal Navy ships by 2027. DragonFire will be able to fire at any target visible in the air at about £10 a shot and with an accuracy equivalent to hitting a pound coin from a kilometre away, according to the MoD. The industry team behind it is led by MBDA and includes Qinetiq and Leonardo.
Industry experts said such weapons promised low-cost defence once in use but challenges included the upfront investment. Paul Gray, head of business development for advanced weapons at Qinetiq, said the reason so many countries were investing in the capability was that it was a “repeatable defensive system that can keep engaging”.
Graphics and illustrations by Ian Bott and Bob Haslett