Uh oh:
A loitering munition is a hybrid offspring of cruise missiles and drones. It is a grenade with rotors, a bomb with wings, and a bad day for somebody down the line. This week, the Israel Defense Forces announced a purchase of Spike Firefly Loitering Munitions, a six-and-a-half pound flying bomb built into a weird drone.
In terms of size and function, the Firefly is essentially a longer-range, more accurate grenade.
Like a grenade, the point of the Firefly is to put an explosion somewhere immediately useful but far from the person launching it. The flying bomb can travel up to 1,600 feet in an urban setting and almost 3,300 feet in open terrain, traveling at a speed of 36 mph. The Firefly’s explosive payload, a 350 gram “omnidirectional fragmentation warhead,” contains almost twice as much explosive as the standard M67 Fragmentation Grenade used by the U.S. military.
Advanced stealthy F-35s can rule the blue skies and have no effect on the "brown skies" just above our infantry at the pointy tip of the spear:
I was worried about the ability of standard air defenses--ground and air--to defend forward American infantry in those low-level "brown skies," as I have dubbed the skies below the blue skies where F-35s roam and the mud and dust of the ground where the infantry fights. In a recent Army article I argued for air defense drone swarms to cover the brown skies above our infantry against enemy drone swarm attacks.
This would be part of a new layer in a layered defense to protect our forces.
In related news, "tiny" air-to-air missiles are under development. They are good for internal bays on stealth fighters.
Would they work for drone fighters designed to shoot down other drones in the "brown skies" over forward infantry, as I argued for in that article in Army magazine?
I don't believe this scale of a threat can be countered by ground-based systems that the infantry have to lug around with them on top of everything else they carry just to do their ground combat mission.
Drone swarm attackers require an aerial swarm loitering defense.
