Teeny-Tiny Drone Fires Teeny-Tiny Missile

[Ed Jewett]

Teeny-Tiny Drone Fires Teeny-Tiny Missile (Gulp)
By Spencer Ackerman May 20, 2011



TAMPA, Florida Never let it be said that small isn't powerful. A Northern California company has just built commandos perhaps the smallest drone that can kill you. Underscoring the point, it's even painted camouflage, like Stallone in Rambo.

The Arcturus company built its eponymous drone as the unmanned aerial equivalent of a compact car. Its wingspan is just over 17 feet, making it slightly smaller than the Army and Marine Corps' Shadow drone. Arcturus is "primarily" a spy plane, says engineer Eric Folkestad. Emphasis on "primarily."

Because the life-size Arcturus on display at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference here has a conspicuous add-on under its left wing. That's a Saber, a 10-pound laser-guided missile (.pdf) manufactured by MBDA. In tests, Arcturus discovered that the wings of its drone can carry 22 pounds' worth of cargo, making it a candidate to wield MBDA's missiles. "No one else can do that in our size category," Folkestad says.



Not for lack of trying. For years, both the Army and Marine Corps have tried to weaponize the Shadow, an attempt to make it the pint-sized Salacious Crumb to the Jabba the Hutt of drones, the Hellfire-armed Predator. If it works, a battalion commander won't have to call headquarters for unmanned air support. He'll have the air support himself.

So far, though, armed drones of this size haven't made it out of the testing stage. And that includes the Arcturus.

Folkestad says his company has shipped 12 of the drones to the Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force in the past 18 months. They're still in evaluation. But if it gets the thumbs up, then ever-smaller units will command their own flying killer robots, another step in the proliferation of drone warfare.

Unlike the other "tier-2 class" drones, Arcturus is intended primarily for commandos. Like the Shadow, it's launched from a pneumatic catapult, and doesn't need a runway to land. Unlike a Shadow, the Arcturus is a modular design: The wings and the tail snap off of the 100-pound plane for portability by small special-operations detachments behind enemy lines.

Hence the camouflage. The camo might look a little silly when the Arcturus is up at its max height of 15,000 feet. But that missile is no laughing matter.

If that sounds a little callous, consider this: Arcturus shares its company name with a fantastically dark Norwegian black metal band. Folkestad doesn't need reminding: "You Google us; you get them."

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/...sile-gulp/

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Targeted Killing Lite: Inside the CIA's New Drone Arsenal
By Nathan Hodge April 26, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI14Xkvj5...r_embedded

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has long been wise to a problem: Weapons designed for Cold War combat are often too powerful and too lethal for low-intensity conflict and counterinsurgency. Now it seems the CIA is catching on to the concept as well.

In today's Washington Post, Joby Warrick and Peter Finn report that the CIA may be using "new, smaller missiles" to take out suspected insurgents in Pakistan's tribal areas, in combination with better surveillance and other technological upgrades.

Last month, they write, a CIA missile "probably no bigger than a violin case and weighing about 35 pounds" targeted a house in Miram Shah, in Pakistan's South Waziristan province. The strike killed a top al-Qaeda organizer, along with several others. Such precise, low-collateral-damage attacks, they add, "have provoked relatively little public outrage."

Leaving aside the question of whether the CIA's campaign of targeted killing is any less controversial our pal Peter Singer argues that is isn't the agency's acquisition of less-lethal weapons is intriguing. While the agency refused to comment on the specifics, it's pretty easy to guess what's going on here.

Take the AGM-114 Hellfire missile, once the primary weapon in the drone arsenal. The hundred-pound missile packs a warhead that was originally designed to destroy a main battle tank. Use it against a more lightly armored target say, a civilian car and it's overkill. At the military's behest, contractors have long been developing a number of alternatives for arming drones.

The video here shows a test launch of Scorpion, a thirty-five pound precision glide bomb developed by Lockheed Martin. As our own David Hambling reported in December, Scorpion uses a vicious warhead known as Battleaxe which "combines shaped-charge, fragmentation and enhanced blast in one compact package, and adds an extra bonus: it throws out fragments of reactive material which explode on impact, making it especially effective against unarmored vehicles and other soft targets. This type of explosive technology can make smaller munitions as effective as their bigger predecessors."

Scorpion was conceived as a competitor to the GBU-44 Viper Strike, a small glide bomb that has already been tested in combat (the Army integrated Viper Strike, a derivative of the Brilliant Anti-Tank Munition, on the RQ-5 Hunter drone).

As Hambling noted, weapons designers have been rushing to develop a number of off-the-shelf air-to-surface weapons for drones, using parts from existing missiles. The Thales Lightweight Multirole Missile, he notes, was developed using elements from Thales's Starstreak/Starburst anti-aircraft missiles, and weighs 28 pounds. Raytheon's Griffin missile is a similar effort: It combines parts of the company's Javelin man-portable anti-tank missile and AIM-9X Sparrow air-to-air missile. It weighs in at 45 pounds.

The Army even put money toward the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS), an effort to design a "smart" 2.75-inch rocket (the Hydra 70 rockets currently fired from helicopters are unguided, area-effect weapons). The Navy, which took over the development effort, recently declared that the APKWS was ready to enter production.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/...y-weapons/