European missile house MBDA is accelerating the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) on its weapons and has announced that, having made significant progress over the past year with its Orchestrike collaborative weapon AI capability, the company’s SPEAR family of turbojet-powered cruise missiles will be the first weapons to feature it.
Orchestrike, which was unveiled by MBDA at the 2023 Paris Air Show, allows weapons to share information about the developing battlespace around them to facilitate greater situational awareness and enhanced tactics. The technology allows information can be shared weapon to weapon, weapon to platform and through third parties on a network.
Briefing a select group of journalists under embargo at MBDA UK’s facilities in Stevenage on 15 July 2024, Greg Nunn, the company’s mission lead for tactical strike, noted that the dynamic tactics enabled by Orchestrike include synchronised time on target, threat avoidance and dynamic target reallocation, although he added there were others that at this point MBDA is declining to publicise.
The network-enabled datalink (NED) and algorithms used by Orchestrike have been primarily funded in house by MBDA, although some of the technology was funded by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory; this was under a technology accelerator construct initiated two years ago on which work continues.
Previewing an Orchestrike digital twin simulator featuring real missile AI, hardware and NEDs that will be on display at the 2024 Farnborough International Airshow from 22-26 July, Nunn took the audience through a scenario featuring dynamic target reallocation. For this, four representative SPEAR missiles were launched against four separate targets of varying value: a mobile surveillance radar valued at 5 points, two mobile surface-to-air missile (SAM) launchers valued at 4 and 3 points and a weapon storage facility valued at 1 point. In the scenario two missiles are intercepted by the enemy’s SAM network and the remaining missiles react live to redirect their attacks and ensure an optimal strike on the highest-priority targets.
Nunn noted that the turbojet-powered SPEAR missiles can throttle up or down to redirect their attacks quite late into the scenario, but would be able to gauge whether such a redirection would be successful and would only do so if it was. He also added that only targets confirmed as such by a ‘man over the loop’ would ever be attacked.
MBDA’s network-enabled SPEAR missiles, which include the in-development SPEAR EW electronic warfare variant, have a length of less than 2 m and weigh less than 100 kg. They leverage multi-mode seeker technology drawn from MBDA’s Brimstone anti-armour missile and feature a multi-effect warhead to address a variety of targets.
Nunn noted that MBDA is very close to a first development firing of a SPEAR missile from a Eurofighter Typhoon, which is the first step to gaining certification of design for the weapon. The priority contract for SPEAR, however, is integration on the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which could carry eight SPEAR missiles within its weapon bays. The ultimate deployment of Orchestrike-enabled SPEAR missiles is therefore tied to the progress of the F-35 programme, in which difficulties with the aircraft’s Technology Refresh 3 (TR-3) upgrade led to a suspension of aircraft deliveries from July 2023.
SPEAR missiles reportedly do appear on a aspirant list of weapons to be covered by the Typhoon’s future Phase 4 Enhancements (P4E) programme, although Nunn said that this had not been firmed up as yet.
It is also possible that SPEAR could be integrated onto the Saab Gripen fighter in future, with Nunn noting, “We work quite closely with the Swedes.”
Although MBDA’s SPEAR family of missiles are the first weapons to be Orchestrike enabled, Nunn emphasised that the technology could be applied to the whole portfolio of MBDA missiles and that the additional cost of enabling them in this way would not be significant.
