Britain is developing a laser-based air defense system to combat swarms of drones
The United Kingdom is working to develop a laser-based air defense system to counter massive drone attacks. The new technology is designed to protect maneuverable military units from the dense deployment of drones characteristic of modern warfare, particularly in Ukraine.
The UK Ministry of Defense has launched the PANOPTES project — an autonomous, vehicle-mounted laser air defense system designed to combat drone swarms and repeated attacks by low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles without rapidly depleting stocks of expensive missiles.
In particular, the ministry aims to create a defense system capable of protecting maneuver forces from dense swarms of drones, a phenomenon increasingly associated with the war in Ukraine.
“We aim to create an integrated C-UAS force protection system capable of autonomous operation and mounted on an army vehicle. This capability should protect deployed troops from complex attacks and attacks aimed at overwhelming existing defenses or depleting stocks of conventional ammunition,” the statement reads.
The Ministry of Defense emphasized that the project must provide more effective protection against new aerial threats than outdated systems, as well as utilize open architectures, on-platform power generation, a modular design, and autonomous operation.
Initial focus is on representative Class 1 UAVs and associated small aerial threats, including single, repeated, sequential, and simultaneous threat profiles.
“Integrating this capability into a future unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is a planned objective. The solution is intended to provide a scalable path to future capabilities for the Army and the Joint Ground Air Defense (JGAD), as well as to account for potential export opportunities,” the country’s Ministry of Defense reported.
This was reported by the UK Ministry of Defense and Army Recognition.
Read also:
On September 3, a man was injured in the Boryspil district of the Kyiv region as a result of a Russian attack. It is known that one person was wounded by the enemy strike.
In the Khmelnytskyi region, a warehouse at one of the enterprises caught fire after debris from a downed Russian strike drone fell on it. The fire covered an area of 200 square meters, according to Serhiy Tyurin, head of the regional military administration.
Over the past day, 15 private homes were damaged in the Mykolaiv region as a result of attacks by Russian Shahed-type strike drones. A social services building and three cars were also damaged, according to Mykolaiv Regional Military Administration Head Georgy Reshetilov.
