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Americki noviteti, novi kontejneri sa opremom, manji dronovi i novo oruzje
How General Atomics Is Going All-In On Making Its Drones Relevant In A Peer-State Conflict
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40698/how-ge.....e-conflict
Citat:"By employing these smaller UAS, Reaper and Gray Eagle operators will be able to penetrate, disintegrate and exploit anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) air defenses, and support operations in any domain," Brinkley added, though, of course, any such penetration would be indirect. "Meanwhile, the greater standoff afforded by these smaller UAS increases the survivability of the larger aircraft by placing them outside the kinetic range of tactical surface-to-air missiles."
These small drones are just one of a number of efforts to reduce the vulnerability of the Reapers and Gray Eagles, as well as give them additional mission sets, to help ensure their relevance going forward. The concept art of the MQ-1C carrying one of the newly disclosed UASs also shows that aircraft equipped with a new self-protection pod that GA-ASI has been working. The company had announced in January that it had finished a flight test demonstration of this system, which it had developed under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with SOCOM, on the MQ-9.
The pod has built-in radar warning receivers, as well as an AN/AAQ-45 Distributed Aperture Infrared Countermeasure (DAIRCM) system. The AN/AAQ-45 uses an array of electro-optical and infrared sensors to detect and track incoming missiles, and can then employ a laser against threats that employ infrared seekers to blind and confuse them, throwing them off course. The podded self-defense system also has a countermeasures dispenser that can release decoy flares, chaff, and the BriteCloud expandable radio-frequency decoy. That latter countermeasure, which you can read more about here, is used to lure away radar-guided missiles.
Citat:REAP underscores another potential future role for the MQ-9, as a communications and datalink gateway node. GA-ASI says that this pod "provides the foundation for an Open Mission Systems (OMS) capable communications gateway (ABMS building block)." An open-architecture system is one designed to be readily adaptable and upgradeable to give existing systems additional functionality and enable all-new capabilities. ABMS is the U.S. Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System program, which is a broad initiative exploring a wide array of new technology to improve networking and associated capabilities, with a heavy emphasis on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The REAP pod is also notably one of three pods that the Air National Guard is now exploring as part of a large upgrade package, referred to as Ghost Reaper, for its MQ-9s. General Atomics first unveiled the Ghost Reaper concept in 2020. A Reaper from the 174th Attack Wing, an element of the New York Air National Guard, flew with a set of Ghost Reaper pods during the recent iteration of the annual Northern Edge exercise in Alaska.
The other two pods that are part of this configuration are a Centerline Avionics Bay Pod, which provides an expansion area where various additional systems can be installed, and Northrop Grumman's Freedom Pod. The Freedom Pod contains the advanced Freedom 550 software-defined radio, which, depending on its exact configuration, has the power to translate between a wide array of different and otherwise incompatible waveforms, as well as sport an infrared search and track (IRST) system.
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