Cut-price anti-drone weapon could be ready next year

A cut-price weapon that can take down multiple drones at once by disrupting their electronics could be available as early as next year, says the head of the company spearheading the development for the UK.

Alex Cresswell, chair and chief executive of Thales UK, said the new radio frequency directed energy weapon (RFDEW), which is being field tested with the UK military over the summer, should be ready for use “quite quickly”.

“Going from something that works in real life on Salisbury Plain to something that you would send off to Ukraine is still quite a jump. It’s a year’s jump but not many years’ jump,” said Cresswell in an interview with the Financial Times.

“Could the system that we have demonstrated be available for someone to field [as early as next year]? Yes, of course it could,” he added.

Thales UK, the British subsidiary of the French defence and technology group, is leading the development of the weapon as part of an industrial consortium under contract with the Ministry of Defence. A decision on when and where to deploy the system would be up to the UK government.

At a cost of only 10p per use and with a range of up to 1km, the system will offer a cheaper alternative to traditional missile air defence systems, which typically cost upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The technology can be mounted on military vehicles and uses a mobile power source to produce radio frequency waves or pulses to interfere with the electronics of a moving target.

The industry, said Cresswell, has been working on countermeasures against incoming attacks for decades. However, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine both sides have relied heavily on drones to attack from the skies, spurring investment from governments and industry in ways to counter such attacks.

What people are trying to pursue, he added, is weapons that are “much more cost effective for the combat mass that they provide”.

Thales, which has the French government as its biggest investor, generated €18.4bn in revenues in 2023 and is recruiting heavily worldwide. In the UK, where it employs more than 7,000 people, sales have risen 20 per cent over the past two years to just over £1.1bn by the end of 2023.

Cresswell said he expected sales in the UK to increase another 10 per cent this year as the company benefits from higher government orders. It makes missiles and launchers at two sites in Belfast in Northern Ireland, as well as providing sonar systems for the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines.

Missiles made in Belfast have been supplied, via the UK Ministry of Defence, to Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not only depleted governments’ weapons stockpiles but also underlined that most were too small to cope with a long and intense conflict.

Output at the Belfast facilities, where Thales builds the Starstreak short-range air defence system and assembles the Saab NLAW anti-tank system, has doubled over the past 18 months to its highest level for the past two decades. Cresswell said Thales plans to double output again over the next two years to meet demand.

There has been a “seismic shift” in the way weapons and munitions are procured, with a “much higher focus on resilience being built in, capacity being built in and the ability to scale up being built in”, he said.