US Army awarded $66 million contract to develop microwave weapons to burn drones

Main article: Microwave weapons

At the end of January 2023, the US Army will begin developing and integrating powerful microwave devices to combat small drones. Epirus won a $66 million contract for the development of microwave weapons for burning drones.

According to budget documents, the Pentagon spent more than $50 million in 2022 to develop technologies to combat small drones. To solve this problem, in 2020, the Joint Directorate for Combating Small UAVs was created. It is planned that $18.7 million will be spent on the development, integration and testing of new means of hitting individual drones and their swarms using powerful microwave radiation.

On January 23, 2023, Epirus announced that it had won a $66 million prototype contract from the Army's Office of Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies for Leonidas experimental microwave weapons to combat drones. The Army will "move Leonidas into a future record program following a successful prototype demonstration," according to a company statement.

Leonidas microwave weapon

Andy Lowry, product director and chief operating officer of Epirus, described Leonidas as a weapon of directed electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. Like the laser that the military has been using for years to protect drones, Leonidas is a weapon of directed energy; unlike a laser, it can focus on the entire lane of the sky. Leonidas also outperforms the "jammer" type of protection, since it even acts on drones that do not have communication with their operators.

In 2022, Lowry revealed that Epirus had begun testing weapons against a large group of drones. He said Epirus is experimenting with gallium nitride chips, which have been shown to boost power in radar and directional energy systems. Previous microwave weapons used vacuum tubes, which he said direct energy "into a huge parabolic antenna in a very, very thin beam and thus fire like a high-energy laser." The use of gallium nitride, as well as new machine learning techniques to identify the frequency, allows Leonidas to vary energy output depending on the type of drone to target, Andy Lowry said.^[1]

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