The Marine Corps has inked an $11 million contract with electronic warfare company Epirus for a vehicle-mounted weapon that can take down dozens of drones in a single zap.
The contract, awarded through the Office of Naval Research, will result in the delivery early next year of a High-power Microwave Autonomous Vehicle Operational Capability (HAVOC) system that can autonomously identify drone targets to be dropped from the sky with an electromagnetic pulse.
The award follows prototype testing of the similar Expeditionary Directed Energy Counter-Swarm (ExDECS) weapon prototype that Epirus delivered to the Corps for testing last year under a $5.5 million contract.
Compared with ExDECS, the HAVOC system will have three times the power, improved ruggedness and range and autonomous capabilities intended to simplify decision-making for human operators, the company said.
“We’ve tripled the power density nearly in this system. So think of it, from a laser point of view that a lot of people are familiar with, like going from a 50-kilowatt to 150-kilowatt type laser in the same size package. So that directly kind of contributes to lethality, range, these types of things,” Epirus CEO Andy Lowery told Defense News in an interview. “We’ve also very much increased the reliability of the system and its suitability for various types of weather, types of different locations, dust, and all of that, where the Marines are dragging this thing around.”
Lowery called the increase in the weapon’s effective range “significant,” though he said he couldn’t give specifics.
Epirus says its microwave energy beams, powered by gallium nitride transistors, deliver a precise “force field” blow of interference that can take out swarms of drones with minimal collateral damage.
“We’re specifically useful with defending critical points that just have zero fail – cannot get hit – or defending mobile formations,” Lowery said, “Which is a lot of times what the Marines are looking for when they’re [operating] their expeditionary units.”
The HAVOC system will be delivered with a universal sled mount “for seamless integration across the Marine Corps’ manned and unmanned ground vehicle fleets,” according to an Epirus announcement.
The counter-drone advances the Marine Corps is making parallel the work of the Army, which signed a $66 million deal with Epirus in 2023 for the Leonidas counter-drone weapon prototype. Since receiving the first Leonidas system in late 2023 for testing, the service has deployed the systems to the Middle East and Pacific on an experimental basis. Last year, the Army inked a nearly $44 million contract for delivery of two of the systems. Shortly after, Epirus announced the system had downed 49 aerial drones in a single pulse during a live-fire demonstration.
Testing and evaluation with the Army, particularly in deployed environments, helped develop the requirements for the ruggedized and mobile HAVOC system, Lowery said.
“We realized sort of where the system was strong and where it needed to be improved, and so we’ve incorporated all of that learning into this second generation and getting it into a production-ready state,” he said. “We went through some monsoons, actually, and one of our systems was found to have a little bit of a leak in it … some of those monsoons were like dunking it underwater. So we improved upon the waterproofing and the dust-proofing.”
The Marine Corps is likely to build HAVOC into its existing expeditionary drone defense infrastructure following rigorous testing. The service is now fielding the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS), a counter-drone weapons package mounted on two lightweight all-terrain vehicles that can be transported via helicopter or MV-22 Osprey.
“No single system’s a panacea, and neither are we,” Lowery said. “But we provide the goalie kind of thing before the final puck gets in the net, where you’ve had leakers or you have overwhelmed your other systems through quantity, mass, swarms. And we’re the final line of defense against those types of threats.”