U.S. defense contractor Raytheon says the U.S. Army has begun buying a version of its expendable Coyote drone that can operate alone or in a swarm, along with a compact fire control radar, to bring down small hostile unmanned aerial vehicles. Since the unmanned defenders have a small warhead, the service may also be able to readily employ them as loitering munitions and the entire system could eventually take on other roles.
The Massachusetts-headquartered company announced that it was in the process of delivering the Coyote Block 1B variants to the Army in response to an “urgent operational need” at a press conference on July 17, 2018, at the biennial Farnborough Airshow in the United Kingdom. At present, the firm has provided more than 32 drones to the service and it is set to fulfill the full order of an unspecified number of the unmanned aircraft by the end of 2018, according to Shepard.