Tucson's Raytheon sees high demand for drone-killing weapons

Raytheon’s Tucson operation is serving a critical and growing role in providing the nation and its allies with weapons to counter the rapidly evolving threat of drone warfare — and the Pentagon wants more, and fast.

The Army recently awarded Raytheon a $75 million contract to produce 600 of its Coyote 2C drone interceptors, which in testing has shown it can destroy small, unmanned aircraft by streaking to them and exploding at close range.

The contract award, announced Feb. 9, was part of a Secretary of Defense “rapid acquisition authority” notification to Congress, the Army said.

The recent contract comes after the Army awarded Raytheon $237 million in April to produce anti-drone systems, including radars and Coyote interceptors.

And the Army wants thousands more Coyotes in the future.

In December, the Army filed a notice that it intends to contract with Raytheon to supply 6,000 missile-like Coyote 2 kinetic interceptors, which use explosive warheads, along with 700 non-kinetic Coyote interceptors, which can knock drones out of commission using electronic means like jamming.

The contracting notice also calls for Raytheon to provide 152 of its Ku-band Radio Frequency Systems, or KuRFS, including 33 mobile radars, and 277 Coyote launchers with 25 mobile launchers.

Originally developed by Raytheon for the Army in 2012 to detect and track rocket, artillery and mortar attacks in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the KuRFS radar provides persistent, 360-degree coverage and are said to be sensitive enough to detect a 9-millimeter bullet.

Together with a Northrop Grumman command and control system and other hardware, the Raytheon systems form LIDS — the Army’s “Low, slow, small, unmanned aircraft Integrated Defeat System.”

Growing threat

The Pentagon has been clamoring for new counter-drone systems to meet the threat from small, inexpensive drones that have become a major threat to U.S. and allied ground troops in Syria and Iraq and shipping in the Red Sea.

In 2020, the Army began deploying LIDS to the U.S. Central Command area, which includes the Middle East and parts of Asia, though details of their operations have been kept secret.

“There’s some phenomenal capabilities out there, including the Coyote — that’s working and the demand for that is off the charts,” said Riki Ellison, a former Tucsonan who closely follows developments in drone warfare as founding chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance in Virginia.

Raytheon declined to answer specific questions about the operational use of its counter-drone weapons but said it’s prepared to help the nation meet that threat.

“The threat posed by enemy drones is real and proliferating; evident in current-day conflicts around the globe,” the company said in a prepared statement. “Raytheon has developed the enabling technologies, as well as complete and customizable systems, that enable ground forces to defeat complex unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS, threats in any environment.”

Evolving Coyote

The Coyote — originally developed as part of a Navy research program in the early 2000s by a Tucson tech startup later acquired by Raytheon — initially was a small, relatively low-cost, propeller-driven drone.

Designed to be tube-launched from ground, sea or air, the Coyote 1 had flip-out wings and an electric-powered pusher propeller allowing it to loiter aloft for up to an hour individually or networked together in swarms.

Raytheon paired the Coyote with its KuRFS radar to create the Howler Counter Unmanned Aerial System, which was deployed by the Army in 2019 after the service declared defense against drones and other airborne threats an “urgent operational need.”

Raytheon later developed the Coyote 2, with improved sensors and a jet engine for increased speed and range, and narrow stability and control fins instead of a long main wing and tail-fin assembly.

Looking and flying more like a missile than a drone, the radar-guided Coyote Block 2 uses a proximity fuse to detonate a blast-fragmentation warhead near a drone or other threat, with a reported range of about 15 kilometers or just over 9 miles. The Army funded development of an enhanced target seeker in 2021.

Raytheon also has developed the Coyote Block 3, a propeller-driven, winged version similar to the Coyote 1 that can down drone targets using unspecified “non-kinetic” weapons, which could include things like microwave pulses or jamming to bring down targets without contact.

Coyote at sea

In May, the Navy awarded Raytheon a contract worth up to nearly $150 million to upgrade its Coyote 3 drone for future missions, including precision-strike capabilities and the ability to launch from unmanned surface vessels and submarines.

The Coyote 2 and 3 have downed multiple drone targets in testing, including a test last summer at the Yuma Proving Ground in which the system took on a swarm of 30 drone targets and downed several single targets and swarms, Raytheon said.

Both the Coyote 2 and 3 are in “active production” supporting current contracts, with much of the work performed in Tucson, Raytheon said.

“As the threat of unmanned systems continues to grow, the performance and reliability of a complete (counter-drone) system is critical,” Raytheon said. “With KuRFS and Coyote, we can help to give our warfighters a decisive advantage over enemy drones with an effective solution to counter the threat.”

U.S. allies also are interested in the Coyote, and in 2020, the U.S. government approved the Coyote 2 system for foreign sales.

In late 2022, the State Department approved the proposed sale potentially worth about $1 billion of 10 fixed-site LIDS, including 200 Coyotes, to Qatar, though no production contracts have been made public.

While the Army has not listed unit costs for the “low-cost” Coyote, they reportedly have a price tag of about $100,000 each, and the recent Army contract works out to $125,000 apiece.

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That’s much cheaper than longer-range naval missiles reportedly being used in some cases to down scores of drones and missiles fired from Yemen by Houthi rebels against shipping in the Red Sea, which analysts say include small- to mid-sized drones the Coyote is designed to defeat.

The Pentagon has reported that Navy ships have downed scores of Houthi drones and missiles but hasn’t officially released details about the weapons used.

Military analysts say the Navy has likely used Raytheon’s Standard Missile-2 ship-defense missile, which cost about $2 million per copy.

U.S. warships in the area also carry the $4 million, multi-role SM-6 interceptor, which was reportedly used to shoot down a Houthi anti-ship missile in late January, though the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed the reports.

For ship defense, Navy warships including destroyers and cruisers deployed to the Red Sea also are equipped with Raytheon’s Evolved Sea Sparrow missile, which cost about $1.7 million each, and its smaller Rolling Airframe Missile ship-defense system, at about $900,000 per copy.

Those U.S interceptors cost many times more than the Houthis larger drones, whose cost is estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars to around $100,000, and their older or copied Iranian missiles.

Last line of defense

But Ellison said that cost comparison misses the point.

“The number one thing is, the value of these weapons systems is not what they intercept, it’s what they protect,” he said. “So those SM-6s are protecting a $2 billion ship with 300 U.S. Navy sailors on it.”

Beyond the “cost curve” concern, Ellison said, is that the barrage of Houthi drones and missiles is requiring U.S. forces to use up its arsenal faster than it can be replenished by Raytheon and other contractors already struggling to make extra weapons to replenish those used to help Ukraine.

“You’ve got to look at, in warfare, that the other side has figured out how to engage your expensive weapons with their least expensive weapons and that’s a win for them — no matter if they hit the ship or not, or hit the base or not, they’re expending your capabilities,” he said.

Navy warships also mount Raytheon’s Phalanx Close-in Weapon system, a radar-guided, rapid-fire 20-millimeter cannon that is seen as the “last line of ship defense.”

According to reports by CNN and Navy Times attributed to Pentagon officials, the Navy destroyer USS Gravely used a Phalanx system to down a Houthi missile within a mile of the ship in the Red Sea in late January.

Directing energy

So-called directed-energy weapons — using high-powered bursts of energy or lasers — can down drones and other aerial threats much more cheaply than missiles and don’t have to be stored and reloaded.

But such systems come at a high upfront cost, and laser systems in particular can have trouble with atmospheric effects like fog and smoke.

A few U.S. directed-energy systems have already been deployed and some are still in development, with Raytheon involved several efforts.

In 2019, the Air Force deployed Raytheon’s ground-based, mobile High-Energy Laser Weapon System, or HELWS, overseas for base and force protection.

The system has more than 25,000 hours of operation and is certified for use in combat, with multiple additional systems now deployed, Raytheon says.

The company, which does its laser contract work mainly in McKinney, Texas, also is supplying the laser unit for the Army’s Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense system, with prime contractor Kord Technologies.

The Army said four prototypes of that system were delivered to an Army air-defense artillery regiment at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in September.

Drone zappers

Raytheon also has developed directed-energy systems designed to jam drone communications or disable them with pulses of energy.

In late January, Raytheon announced that the Air Force Research Laboratory had successfully completed a three-week field test of the Counter-Electronic High-Power Microwave Extended-Range Air Base Defense system, or CHIMERA, at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The CHIMERA, which fires highly concentrated radio energy at multiple middle-to-long-range targets, successfully directed energy at static targets and successful detected and tracked aerial targets, Raytheon said.

In December, Raytheon said it will build two high-power microwave antenna systems for the Navy and Air Force that will use directed energy to defeat drones and other airborne threats.

The three-year, $31.3 million contract is part of the Directed Energy Front-line Electromagnetic Neutralization and Defeat (DEFEND) program.

The Pentagon has not released details of combat use of directed-energy weapons.

The Government Accountability Office in a report issued in April 2023 found that despite decades of development work, the Pentagon has struggled to move its directed-energy programs from development to production, recommending that the armed services reach transition agreements with defense contractors.