Teledyne FLIR Defense [TDY] on Tuesday unveiled its new Rogue 1 recoverable loitering munition, its system picked for the Marine Corps’ Organic Precision Fires-Light (OPF-L) program that the company described as an “exponential, massive leap” in capability.
Along with the new OPF-L program, Teledyne FLIR Defense’s Rogue 1 is being evaluated for Special Operations Command’s Ground Organic Precision Strike Systems (GOPSS) program and the company has already delivered more than 70 to support a separate Marine Corps year-long experimentation effort.
“The new Rogue 1 gives warfighters the versatility, survivability and lethality demanded by the modern battlespace,” JihFen Lei, Teledyne FLIR Defense’s executive vice president and general manager, said in a statement. “With its unique ability to be recovered and reused when targeting conditions change, this innovative platform also offers military forces greater economy and flexibility. Rogue 1 leverages our decades of expertise developing combat-proven drone technology and complements our global UAS portfolio – from the Black Hornet nano-drone to our SkyRaider and SkyRanger quadcopters to our StormCaster sensor and targeting payloads.”
Along with Teledyne FLIR Defense, the Marine Corps also selected Anduril Industries and AeroVironment [AVAV] for the OPF-L program to provide lightweight loitering munitions for infantry squads (Defense Daily, April 15).
Rogue 1 is Teledyne FLIR Defense’s first loitering munition capability, with a company official telling Defense Daily the development o the system began in early 2020 and cited SOCOM’s GOPSS effort as a “big help” in further showcasing the platform’s new capabilities.
“We reached out to the Special [Forces] users, the community that was using a legacy loitering munition at the time. We asked for feedback. ‘Hey, what works? What doesn’t work? What would you like to see in a new capability?’ And we took all of those notes and basically generated, from scratch, a new solution and checked every single one of their boxes,” Brian Bills, Teledyne FLIR Defense’s director of UAS product management, told Defense Daily in an interview last week ahead of publicly unveiling Rogue 1 for the first time on Tuesday at the SOF Week conference in Tampa, Florida. “We showed up for a fly-off in their initial phase of that program…and from that fly-off they downselected to our solution for subsequent phases. We’re in the middle of a phase two [now] where they’re procuring hardware to take it through test and certification processes as well as some live-fire testing later this summer.”
Separately, Bills confirmed Teledyne FLIR Defense has also delivered 76 Rogue 1s to the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab to support Infantry Battalion Experiment-30 (IBX30) campaign, designed to “help inform their future doctrine.”
“We’re kind of the surrogate loitering munition participating in that experiment,” Bills told Defense Daily. “We’ve been very transparent [with the Marine Corps] about the development of Rogue 1 throughout that time period dating back the last four years. So they were very eager to get their hands on it as soon as they possibly could and they saw this IBX30 experimentation as their first real opportunity to evaluate the system. So we supported them on that timeframe.”
The OPF-L program is intended to provide Marine Corps infantry squads with precision-strike capabilities that can be organically deployed against adversaries at beyond line-of-sight ranges.
The Marine Corps’ priorities for their OPF-L effort were focused around Vertical Takeoff and Landing solutions, modularity with payloads and getting after platforms that are recoverable, according to Bills.
“We’ve argued that [Rogue 1] is actually an exponential, massive leap in capability. We’re able to very aggressively keep the cost and the logistics chain down because of the recoverability nature of the system. So it’s not a one-and-done system like a typical loitering munition. If the opportunity doesn’t present itself to engage the target, you can recover it and reuse it which saves a tremendous amount of cost for the users. That’s a big deal,” Bill said.
Bills said Rogue 1’s quadcopter design provides an “inherent vertical takeoff and landing capability” and detailed the system’s modularity capability, with the company offering the munition with three different payloads.
“This is one of our key differentiators, that we actually, out of the gate, are supplying three different payload variants. This particular one that we have on it today is our trainer payload. This allows an operator to get practice repetitions on target sets and it has a special laser in place of the actual warhead that actually allows the system to autonomously disengage at the very last second so it doesn’t impact the target. And then the operator can go back and do more reps without any damage whatsoever,” Bills said.
“The two other payloads are lethal payloads. Externally they look very similar with a few identifying markings. But the big differences are one has an [Explosively Formed Penetrator] (EFP), or anti-armor, warhead in it that is designed to poke a hole into armor and the other one is a forward fragmenting warhead that is designed for anti-personnel applications. Depending on the target set, in real time the operator can in two seconds swap one of the payloads out for another,” Bills added.
Bills also noted Rogue includes a patented gimbaled design for the sensor and warhead on the payload, for “extremely precise targeting,” and has the ability for 30 minutes of flight time at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour.
“It can go out to 10 kilometers, loiter for a few minutes and then come back from 10 kilometers and land, which is pretty remarkable,” Bills said.
Teledyne FLIR noted Rogue 1 leverages the company’s expertise as a sensor provider, with the new loitering munition featuring “advanced electro-optical and FLIR Boson 640+ thermal cameras to deliver day/night long-range reconnaissance and surveillance.”
“Because we are a sensor company, we’ve packed it with a lot of sensors. On the bottom side of it there’s a sensor suite that actually points down and it includes a daylight camera, a night time camera and a laser range finder. And this enables us, day or night, to be able to operate without GPS to continue the mission through visual odometry,” Bills said.
The Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for OPF-L, which could total up to $249 million, begins with a five-year base period followed by a three-year option period.
Three firms received initial awards to each deliver 127 loitering munitions, with Teledyne’s order worth $12.1 million, AeroVironment’s $8.9 million and Anduril’s $6.5 million.
AeroVironment last month confirmed its providing the upgraded Block 20 version of its Switchblade 300 loitering munition for OPF-L (Defense Daily, April 19).
Anduril has declined to offer specifics on its capability for OPF-L, while signaling that it will provide additional details in the near future.