HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – RTX’s [RTX] Raytheon unveiled and demonstrated its new DeepStrike autonomous launcher at the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 experiment, which included firing the company’s offering for a new training rocket.
Brian Burton, Raytheon’s vice president of precision fires and maneuver, told
Defense Daily the company has been developing the DeepStrike concept for just over a year as it looks to showcase a solution to offer an autonomous mobile platform capable of combining offensive and defensive fires, and that it received “incredibly positive” feedback on the demo.
“We designed the DeepStrike launchers in mind to have both offensive and defensive capabilities in a single platform. So that is something that we see, as the Army develops requirements and in recognizing their needs, that more depth of fire is always something they’re going to need. Magazine depth is something they’re always going to need. And our system provides that too,” Burton said in interview at the Association of the United States Army’s Global Force Symposium here.
“Our systems will provide that [mobility], whether you’re talking about a larger [capability], like a Tomahawk or an SM-6, or you’re talking about AMRAAMS or AIM-9X class [weapons]. So to have that capability, the mobility and the autonomy to take some of the pressure off of the warfighting team, all of those are I think capabilities the Army is going to desire and want,” Burton added.
Raytheon teamed with Oshkosh Defense [OSK] and self-driving technology startup Forterra on DeepStrike, with the former providing Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) A2 as the base for the platform and the latter contributing the autonomy kits that utilizes its AutoDrive software.
“You would have seen a lead vehicle with an autonomous follower behind it. And then you would have also seen waypoint navigation to be able to leave a formation, come back to the formation, go on rugged terrain, go off road,” Burton said.
The capability fired from DeepStrike at Project Convergence was Raytheon’s offering for the Army’s Joint Reduced Range Rocket (JR3) program, which utilizes a rocket motor developed by Ursa Major.
“That’s one of the things we’re trying to leverage, how do we take the speed, agility, investment and enthusiasm that we see with the non-traditionals and marry that up with high volume production, robust testing and put the two together and give the Army a better capability,” Burton said.
Burton noted the JR3 development effort is an active competition currently, with the Raytheon awaiting the Army’s next step to potentially select vendors to produce shorter range training rockets in low-rate quantities.
“It’s an urgent need for [the Army] to have the training capability,” Burton said. “I would say the diminishing sources of supply have made it a top priority for them.”
“From a rapid prototyping perspective, to be able to have our own launcher capability, a more modern launcher, and to be able to use it with [our offering] for JR3 rockets and other family of missiles was our vision for that,” Burton added.
Raytheon is planning for continued internal investment and demonstrations with DeepStrike, to include looking at the addition of an autonomous resupply capability, Burton told Defense Daily.
“We are going to continue to evolve the maturity of the auto-drive and demonstrating that capability and demonstrating in more weather adverse environments,” Burton said.