It’s no secret the US Army has a drone problem. Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, has compelled both sides in the wider conflict to invest heavily in tiny, explosives-laden drones.
More than two years into the war, the Ukrainians are lobbing as many as 100,000 small drones every month at Russian troops all along the 700-mile front line, a quantity sufficient to overwhelm any army’s existing air defences. It’s not for no reason Russian casualties exceeded 1,700 on May 12 – a record bloody day in the 27-month war.
The Russians are launching only slightly fewer drones – and to only slightly less devastating effect.
Anticipating future battlefields humming with tiny aerial drones, the US Army is scrambling to develop new air-defences that it can deploy in sufficient volume to block swarms of tiny drones. The Army’s main drone-killer, its new M-SHORAD air-defence vehicle, is still years away from large-scale deployment.
So in the meantime, the Army is counting on an interim system: the Mobile-Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft System Integrated Defeat System – or M-LIDs.
It’d better work. For a few years, it’s the best defence the world’s leading army can deploy against arguably its biggest threats – tiny drones.
Happily for the Americans, the M-LIDS – a pair of four-wheel Mine-Resistant All-Terrain Vehicle armored trucks, or M-ATVs, together mounting a missile-launcher, guns, a radar and a drone-grounding radio-jammer – is getting an early workout. A pre-war test, if you will. In Gaza.
When the US Army sailed some of its coastal landing ships to Gaza as part of the US military’s humanitarian flotilla, the ships carried – along with a floating pier for food aid – one of the initial M-LIDS vehicle sets.
As the humanitarian pier took shape in early May, at least one M-LIDS vehicle rolled down the pier and took up station at the edge of the beach alongside a heavylift truck packing a radar-guided 20-millimetre auto-cannon – a land-based version of the US Navy’s main anti-missile gun.
The M-LIDS is meant to include two vehicles: one armed with Coyote radar-cued anti-drone missiles, and another with a suite of radio-jammers intended to block the signals that connect drones to their controllers on the ground, potentially miles away.
Last Wednesday, a video circulated online depicting the 20-millimetre naval gun engaging a target over the Gaza beach in a test of the humanitarian air-defence system. The M-LIDS didn’t take part in the test; if it did, it might’ve engaged the target drone if and when the gun missed – by attempting to ground the drone by blocking its control signal.
A complete M-LIDS system would include a vehicle with a missile-launcher, meaning it could do more than just ground an incoming drone – it could shoot it down. But even half an M-LIDS could be a significant capability. If it works. And if the Americans can deploy it widely enough to cover front-line forces.
Scale is the main problem. The million-person US Army needs many hundreds, if not thousands, of counter-drone systems to make any difference in a major war. It currently has just a handful that it can deploy alongside a depleted force of Cold War-vintage air-defences.
Apparently aiming to expand M-LIDS coverage ahead of the wider deployment of the more sophisticated M-SHORAD – that’s manoeuvre short-range air defence, for you English-speakers – the Army is combining the main components of the two-vehicle M-LIDS into a single vehicle, an eight-wheel Stryker.
A 20-ton Stryker is a bigger and more capacious vehicle than a 13-ton M-ATV is. It’s potentially a better counter-drone vehicle. The Army is seeking funding to collapse its drone-defences into a single vehicle, rather than a pair of them, ahead of the wider deployment of improved M-SHORAD vehicles toward the end of the decade.
The single-vehicle M-LIDS might be the US Army’s best bet if a major war breaks out in, say, the next five years – and American brigades must suddenly contend with tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of tiny enemy drones.
The single set – or half-set – of M-LIDS in Gaza is a small, early test of this drone-defence. Anyone hoping for a Western victory over foreign drone hordes should hope it works.
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