You basically have three options when a rocket propelled grenade or small missile is headed for your armored truck. You can try to steer it out of the way. You can hope the truck’s armor plates are strong enough to withstand the impact. And you can pray.
Saab’s North American branch thinks it has a fourth option: shoot the round down before impact.
At the Army’s annual Washington D.C. convention, known as the Association of the United States Army confab, Saab is showing off specs for a system it’s testing called the LEDS, or Land Electronic Defense Systems. In development for several years, LEDS is a missile pod mounted on a truck or a tank combined with a sensor system. Its job is to seek and destroy anything that wants to blow up its host vehicle.
LEDS’s most important feature is the battery of laser and radar sensors mounted next to its weapon pod. The sensors hunt for an incoming round — lasers in case of a high-end, laser-guided missile system has the truck in its sights; radars for a plain old dumb weapon. (Both have been used against U.S. Army vehicles in Iraq.) Once a threat is sensed, the system’s computers figure out the counter-trajectory to launch a Mongoose interceptor missile about the size of a water bottle from one of six tubes per pod. (Human operators are strictly optional.) The Mongoose, homebrewed by a Saab subsidiary in South Africa, is supposed to seek out the incoming round and explode over it, ideally within 20 to 50 meters of the truck.
LEDS is hardly the first “active protection” tech for tanks. The Israelis have one called Windbreaker thatstopped an anti-tank missile this spring. With help from Darpa, the U.S. military looks like it’s merging two similar systems, known as Iron Curtain and Crosshairs, into something that can effectively stop an incoming round before it hits a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected truck.
But LEDS won’t really be ready to market to the U.S. Army until 2013 — when the drawdown in Afghanistan will be in full swing. Saab vice president Brian Lawrence says that his pods are built to attach to legacy Army vehicles, like Abrams tanks or Humvees, and Saab wants to be integrated onto theArmy’s truck of the future, the Ground Combat Vehicle. That is, if the Ground Combat Vehicle — expected to cost about $14 million per truck — survives imminent budget cuts.
And if the system works. The Mongoose is a dumb round, since outfitting a countermeasure for a $500 RPG with a GPS system would cost up to $50,000 per missile. And it sounds like there are a lot of moving parts between the sensor, the trajectory determination and the Mongoose firing.
Saab anticipates its system will cost between $200,000 and $500,000 per truck, which a cash-strapped Army might not be able to afford. “You can’t afford not to protect these vehicles, and more importantly, the people inside,” Lawrence says. That is, if the Army doesn’t want its soldiers strapping scrap “Hillbilly Armor” to their trucks anymore.
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