Amid a rising tide of low-cost weaponized adversary drones menacing American troops overseas, the US navy is pulling out all of the stops to guard its forces from the ever-present risk of dying from above. However between costly munitions, futuristic but complicated directed energy weapons, and its own growing drone arsenal, the Pentagon is more and more eyeing an elegantly easy answer to its rising drone downside: reinventing the gun.
On the Expertise Readiness Experimentation (T-REX) occasion in August, the US Protection Division examined a man-made intelligence-enabled autonomous robotic gun system developed by fledgling defense contractor Allen Management Programs dubbed the “Bullfrog.”
Consisting of a 7.62-mm M240 machine gun mounted on a specifically designed rotating turret outfitted with an electro-optical sensor, proprietary AI, and laptop imaginative and prescient software program, the Bullfrog was designed to ship small arms fireplace on drone targets with much more precision than the common US service member can obtain with a standard-issue weapon just like the M4 carbine or next-generation XM7 rifle. Certainly, footage of the Bullfrog in motion printed by ACS exhibits the truck-mounted system locking onto small drones and knocking them out of the sky with only a few pictures.
The Bullfrog seems efficient sufficient towards drone targets to impress DOD officers: According to Protection Day by day, Alex Lovett, the deputy assistant secretary of protection for prototyping and experimentation throughout the Pentagon’s Analysis and Engineering workplace, informed reporters at an illustration occasion in August that the testing of the “low-cost” Bullfrog answer had “gone very well.” Ought to the Pentagon undertake the system, it will characterize the primary publicly identified deadly autonomous weapon within the US navy’s arsenal, according to the Congressional Analysis Service. (The Workplace of the Secretary of Protection didn’t but reply to WIRED’s request for remark.)
Taking pictures down small, fast-moving drones with standard firearms is a big problem to even probably the most gifted marksman, and the US navy has been pursuing numerous methods to make its small arms more practical towards unmanned airborne threats. These efforts embody the procurement of small- to medium-caliber munitions and “buckshot-like” ammo that may replicate the consequences of the shotguns which have proven effective counter-drone measures amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; rifle-mounted radio frequency and GPS jammers to disorient incoming drones so troops don’t have to hold separate, cumbersome counter-drone weapons just like the Dronebuster or NightFighter; and “sensible” optics from corporations like SmartShooter and ZeroMark that purportedly solely permit a weapon to fireplace when it locks on course. The Military has even began integrating counter-drone exercises into its basic training regimen, a part of a broader effort to make such education as “routine” as standard marksmanship coaching.
For ACS cofounder and CEO Steve Simoni, a former Navy nuclear engineer, one of the best ways to optimize a firearm for drone threats isn’t by way of novel equipment or enhanced coaching, however a mixture of superior robotics and a complicated AI that may take the guesswork out of goal acquisition and monitoring.
