AUSA 2025: Kongsberg looks to add C-UAS capability to US Army’s CROWS remote weapon stations

The US arm of Norway’s Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace is working with the US Army to integrate a counter-unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) capability into the thousands of remote weapon stations (RWSs) it has supplied under the army’s Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station (CROWS) programme.

Over the last 20 years Kongsberg has provided around 17,000 of its Protector remote weapon stations (RWSs) to the US Army under the CROWS programme, with the army now looking at updating those systems.

“We’re in the process of working with the army to take those the legacy CROWS and replace the obsolescent components, taking analogue components and making them making the digital,” John McGee, business development director for Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace Inc, explained to ESD at the 2025 Association of the US Army (AUSA) show on 14 October.

“So how can we take those stations that they already have and give them any additional capability? They don’t need new hardware; they already have the stations,” said McGee. “We work with sensor providers – radar is the most common kind of sensor technology – and we use our collaborative fire control to be able to tie the stations together, and we can turn every single CROWS system the army has into a counter-UAS platform.”

Using the analogy of the layers of an onion, McGee explained how successive layers of air defence protection could be built up from individual vehicles outwards, with the outer layer provided by dedicated short-range air defence assets.

“At the very core of the onion is the vehicle, or the formation,” he said. “Those vehicles already have CROWS. We can give those vehicles the ability to protect themselves and the soldiers and the formation that they’re operating in. You can start to create bubbles of centres of onions, but then … those bubbles populate. You have more and more onions, and then you have a network.”

McGee said Kongsberg is agnostic regarding the sensors required to provide the C-UAS capability, but added, “We need a radar to tell us where to look, essentially, but then our collaborative fire control enables us to engage.” The original RWSs already feature an opto-electronic targeting system, while examples of the C-UAS capability fitted on the RWSs that Kongsberg displayed at AUSA 2025 featured an Echodyne EchoShield radar, which operates in the Ku-band and can track targets beyond 10 km.

Asked what kind of engagement ranges its C-UAS-enhanced RWSs could achieve, McGee explained that this was dependent on the weapon station and its effector, but that the company had gone out to 1,200 m using a .50 cal machine gun.

The M153 CROWS RWS supports the M2 .50 cal machine gun, the M240B 7.62 mm medium machine gun and the M249 5.56 mm Squad Automatic Weapon, as well as the MK19 grenade machine gun.

McGee noted that the company has already provided a similar capability to Ukraine. In 2023, under a multinational effort, Kongsberg added Teledyne FLIR sensors to donated RWSs to give Ukraine a C-UAS capability under the CORTEX Typhon programme.

Before that, in September 2021, Kongsberg was awarded an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity other transaction authority (OTA) production contract by the US Marine Corps to produce Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS) RWSs. These are based on the company’s Protector RS6 RWS, which features a low-recoil 30 mm cannon, while the overall MADIS Mk1 system for the C-UAS mission is mounted on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and also features Stinger missiles.