HUNTSVILLE, Ala.–The Army has selected three vendors to participate in a special user demonstration for its short range Launched Effects effort, an official confirmed Wednesday.
Brig. Gen. Cain Baker, director of the Army’s Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team, said the vendors will provide air vehicles and payloads for the prototyping effort, which is expected to inform the Army’s roadmap for eventually procuring and fielding such capabilities.
An Army spokesperson told Defense Daily it could not disclose the vendors selected to participate, with an announcement expected to be made soon.
“We’ll take that out to a formation here this year. [We’ll] place it in the hands of a fires element, a combat aviation brigade element and a [Special Operations Forces] element, to put that inside their formations, one, to get soldier user feedback. The other piece [of that] is within staff, in the formation how they will use, which will then drive a lot of our doctrine and our training,” Baker said at the AUSA’s Global Force Symposium here.
Launched Effects is the Army’s program to field new autonomous air vehicles that can be launched from aircraft or ground platforms with a variety of payloads and mission system applications to provide a range of effects for reconnaissance, extended communications links and eventually lethal capabilities.
Army officials, including Baker, detailed plans a year ago to pursue rapid prototyping and eventual production for short, medium and long-range Launched Effects capabilities (Defense Daily, March 27 2024).
Baker first mentioned plans in September for a “special user demonstration” for its Launched Effects program, which will involve providing prototype capabilities to multiple formations for use over the next year to gather feedback and inform next steps (Defense Daily, Sept. 4 2024).
“We will actually take Launched Effects into multiple formations over the next year and leave it with them. And I’m talking [about] not only the vehicles [but also] the software, the command and control device and the payloads. So they’ll now have that for an extended period of time so they can have it for home station training and for individual and collective [training]. We’ll take that feedback and we’ll drive the program from there,” Baker said at the time.
With the Army planning to emphasize autonomy as it expands its Transforming in Contact (TiC) rapid fielding initiative, Baker told Defense Daily on Tuesday that the short range LE solutions selected for the special user demo will also participate with “a portion of TiC.”
“With the success of this [effort], we’ll hopefully spring off of that to actually expand it across all of the TiC capabilities,” he said.
The Army has previously said that payload configurations for potential short range LE systems may include Electro-Optical/Infra-Red, Radio Frequency Detect, Identify, Locate, Report, lethal/kinetic, communications relay, and RF Decoy systems (Defense Daily, Jan. 2 2024).