Marines to lean on Anduril tech to protect bases from drones

The Marine Corps, gung-ho on technology that can shield its forces from enemy drones, is planning to acquire a slew of AI-enabled systems from Anduril to protect the service’s installations.

Commanders at U.S. military bases are already seeing large numbers of incursions by small unmanned aerial systems. And those types of threats are expected to increase.

“We must continue to capture the lessons being learned in blood on active battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East. We should pay special attention to the increasing importance of … the proliferation and effectiveness of drones,” Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith wrote in planning guidance issued last year. “We will continue to experiment with and invest in burgeoning capabilities that are defining the modern battlefield such as Ground Based Air Defenses, including Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems.”

In early 2024, the Corps released a solicitation for Installation-Counter Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (I-CsUAS). A few days ago, the Pentagon announced that Anduril beat out nine other offerors and snagged an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth a whopping $642 million to deliver, install and sustain a family of systems between now and March 2035.

“What they’ve selected here is not just a capability that is going to set them up for a future, but something that can deliver real capability to them today,” Kyle Erickson, general manager of air defense at Anduril, told DefenseScoop in an interview Thursday. “Our family of systems is deployed at scale with multiple services at multiple locations around the world. Has been in service for many years. It is proven, it is real, it’s in production. And so they’re picking something that is going to deliver value to them immediately.”

The contractor expects to field capabilities this year.

Erickson noted that the company has already provided a similar capability to U.S. Special Operations Command.

The family of systems that the Marine Corps will get under the new contract includes a variety of sensors and weapons to detect, identify, track and take down small UAS.

Erickson noted that Anduril will provide “an end-to-end capability” across the entire “kill chain,” to include all the fielding and sustainment support services.

“I can’t get into what we’re specifically going to provide for a specific installation in a given circumstance. Part of that is just due to the sensitivity of it, but partially also because different installations will have different priorities or threat profiles. And so I can’t talk about the specific case, but in the general case, you know the Marine Corps here is going to have access to our full family of systems, which includes multi-sensor detect, track, ID capability, including the radar and narrow-field-of-view infrared imaging capability in our Long Range Sensor Towers, the wide area infrared sensing with persistence in the Wisp sensor, as well as radio frequency sensing with the Pulsar capability and multiple defeat options, including low-collateral interceptors, like our Anvil interceptor, as well as the [electronic warfare] capabilities of the Pulsar,” he said. “So across that family of systems, you get multiple sensing modalities, multiple defeat or deter options to deploy flexibly depending on the threat profile or the authorities in a given situation.”

The company’s AI-enabled software platform, called Lattice, will be the centerpiece of the drone-killing architecture.

“Lattice is the software that stitches all this capability together. So it’s providing that command-and-control interface to the end users or operators so that they can command and control all the assets at a given installation from a single pane of glass. It’s also providing the autonomy capabilities on the different products themselves, so providing all the kinds of automated threat identification, sensor fusion, tracking — all the kinds of autonomy capabilities that help our operators to progress through the kill chain much more quickly and reduce the burden on them,” Erickson told DefenseScoop.

Anduril is taking a “software-first” approach to its family of systems, he said, which will facilitate future upgrades to the capabilities as new technologies become available.

Drone threat identification can vary depending on the sensor modality, Erickson noted.

“You might do some track classification based on the kinematics of a radar track, for example, the different characteristics of that track as measured by the radar with something like a narrow-field-of-view optic. Yu can run computer vision algorithms on the imagery and train those over time as you see more data with a radio frequency sensor. As you can imagine, you can do some amount of identification based on the particular signal and the analysis of that signal,” he explained. “And when you have these multiple modalities layered in together, then you have much greater capability of identifying threats.”

While autonomy is a key element of the capability set, Erickson said there is room for a human in the loop, which is important to the Marine Corps.

“The autonomy is really designed to invite the user at key decision points through the kill chain process. So the autonomy is doing a lot of the initial detection, tracking and identification. When a threat is identified, the end user is notified and alerted. They then have an opportunity to make a decision about what to do, whether that’s making a phone call or working through their [standard operating procedures], or even tasking an integrated effector against the threat. So there’s not going to be 100 percent automated, full execution of the kill chain — and that’s very much by design. You know our customers want to have a human operator on the loop for these critical decision points, and that’s a key element in our design approach as well,” he noted.

The $642 million I-CsUAS contract is focused on addressing threats posed by Group 1 and Group 2 drones — which are on the smaller end of the UAS spectrum — but Anduril also has capabilities that can defeat Group 3 systems, Erickson said.

Kamikaze drones, also known as one-way attack drones or loitering munitions, typically fall into the Group 3 category, and they’re a type of weapon that the Marines and the U.S. military writ large are concerned about and want to counter.