Anti-drone warfare
Ukrainian Defense Review/January-March 2020
Anti-drone hand-held guns
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ussia-sponsored separatist insurgents fighting government forces in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, have extensively deployed drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), both for battlefield surveillance and for artillery fire adjustment roles. This has driven Ukrainian industries, specifically UkrSpecTechnika, Proximus LLC, and InterProInvest LLC among others, to launch projects for development and production of air defense countermeasures required by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the National Guard. With this purpose in mind, and given the trends going on in the international UAV market, the Ukrainian companies opted for solutions such as anti-drone jamming guns that neutralize UAV threats by disrupting their GPS and C2 datalinks.
What is an anti-drone gun?
Counter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (C-UAV), or anti-drone weapons and guns are any of a range of countermeasures designed to immobilize a target drone by jamming its remote control and GPS datalinks. They can come in the form of handheld weapons akin to traditional projectile guns, to larger artillery-scale devices which are differentiated by size, the number of personnel involved, and operational range among other characteristics. UAVs are currently commercially available in many countries, and this is what is driving this market up. The converse of this is that individ-
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ual persons, or groups thereof, can use drones for malicious or nefarious activities involving, for example, delivery of contraband, narcotics, or banned food to prisoners, or breach of security to take photos or record video footage. For this reason, governments in those countries had challenged their industries to produce countermeasures against the threats small commercially available UAVs can pose. This led to emergence of anti-drone hand-held guns. The U.S. is leading this market with products such as DroneGun Tactical (by DroneShield), DroneDefender (by Battelle), and Skywall100 (anti-drone bazooka by OpenWorks). In Russia, there is the counter-UAV gun Rex-1 by Kalashnikov (which made its first public appearance at the defense expo Army-2017) and its more recent iteration, the Rex-2 that was unveiled at the Army-2019 expo. There is no information on whether or not Russian-produced Rex-series anti-drone guns have been deployed and
used in military operations in eastern Ukraine and Syria, but it’s likely they have been there, given the extensive use of commercial UAVs in those conflicts. The design & development company Radar, Belarus, has produced the counter-UAV jammers Groza-S and Groza-R. In Germany, H.P. Martketing & Consulting Wust GmbH has developed the HP 47 Counter UAV Jammer that was seen used at World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2017 in Davos, Switzerland, while Aeronautica SDLE, Spain, offers its Aeronautica Anti-drone system. The Turkish company Aselsan has developed its own anti-drone solution, the IHASAVAR that was introduced at the 2017 Arms & Security Expo held in Kyiv.
Ukrainian Solutions
Over the five years of military hostilities in its Donbas region Ukraine has gained an extensive experience
InterProInvest introduced its RIFF-P Anti-Drone Gun at the 2019 Arms & Security Expo held in Kyiv in October
