High-power microwave ‘force field’ knocks drone swarms from sky

Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Air Defense Artillery community stand in front of the IFPC-HPM system alongside Epirus support staff following New Equipment Training in March 2024. (Epirus photo)

In the mix of counter-UAS systems under development today like kinetics, lasers, and jamming, only one technology, high-power microwave (HPM), is specifically designed to take out swarms of drones all at once.

Attacking swarms have become a common feature in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Defensive systems, however, can only shoot down one threat at a time. To address that gap, the Defense Department is experimenting with high-power microwave (HPM) to disable drone swarms and other devices dependent on electronics.

A defensive concept known as “one-to-many”, the U.S. Army is developing these systems with Epirus, a “neo prime” focused on asymmetric warfare. Epirus has delivered four prototype HPM counter-swarm systems under a $66 million OTA issued by the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office in early 2023 under the Integrated Fires Protection Capability High Power Microwave (IFPC-HPM) program. Epirus delivered the first IFPC-HPM system nine months after contract award and finalized delivery of all four systems in March 2024. The Army followed in October with an approximately $17 million contract modification for the development and integration of an upgraded sensor suite in support of IFPC-HPM.

Breaking Defense discussed HPM with Epirus CEO Andy Lowery.

Breaking Defense: What’s the idea behind using HPM to counter drone swarms and the concept of one-to-many short-range air defense?

Andy Lowery is Epirus CEO.

Andy Lowery: This is an idea that changes the paradigm of how we think about defense of critical assets from a one-to-one thought process to a one-to-many thought process. It could be from a detection point of view, a command-and-control perspective, or in the case of Epirus, an effector perspective.

There aren’t many other types of systems that have one-to-many effects. Kinetics you rule out. They’re all one-to-one.

The counter-UAS strategy that the DoD published recently describes a need for this one-to-many philosophy of going after threats like what’s seen in network attacks, which are one-to-many attacks. When I talk to cyber experts, they are bored with me talking one-to-many. They say we’ve been talking about this for 20 years. So, we’re not actually alone in this idea or concept.

In electronic warfare, there’s an interesting comparison with the Next Generation Jammer (NGJ). One of my chief engineering accomplishments at Raytheon was to design the NGJ system, which is a cousin or even a brother to Leonidas, the high-power microwave systems that Epirus specializes in.

Waymo is another example. They have a different mission to navigate a car automatically, but they are processing one-to-many threats: a bicycle, a car, a commuter, a red light. How do they take in all of those 10,000 things at the same time and produce a meaningful objective?

That’s what we have to think about — HPM for high-value asset protection, short-range air-defense protection. The ways of protecting our guarded assets now need to evolve because swarms have manifested into the physical realm and are being developed by the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians.

Do we still need kinetics? Absolutely. We need the kinetics because there’ll be high-value targets that they are assigned to. Then there’ll be swarms – cheap, attributable, and autonomous in the not-too-distant future. Ask any counter-drone warfighter what’s the first thing that pops into their head when they hear the word ‘autonomy’, and they’ll tell you ‘swarms’. Like a Waymo vehicle, each one of them can be sent out with no signals or attachment to anything. The future of autonomy is no outside connectivity.

This is where we come in because it isn’t just counter swarms, it’s counter electronics in a sector-defense way. HPM will affect anything with electronics in it: boat and car motors, night-vision goggles, computers, and switches. That’s all vulnerable. Those all are hypersensitive to this type of electromagnetic radiation.

Epirus delivered the first IFPC-HPM system nine months after contract award and finalized delivery of all four systems in March 2024. (Epirus photo)

Tell us about your HPM solution called Leonidas.

Leonidas spins on a gimbal and generates a persistent field of electromagnetic energy in the sky. As you push it into the airspace, incoming drones come into that energy field and begin to get confused. Different parts of the electronics are starting to pull energy onto the boards and they begin to overload.

Epirus HPM basically cyber-attacks a target through an analog vector of absorption, meaning we don’t move in through an antenna through an RF chain and then into the digital part of the system that pushes out some kind of effect. We come straight into the analog pieces like a servo motor or wires that run down the wing of an aircraft. These things become vectors of attack for this type of entry with high-power microwave.

The CONOPs would be to find the exposed area of whatever asset you’re protecting. If it is a base totally out in the open you can’t beam these HPM systems over the base, so you would need to have maybe five or six of our systems positioned in a way that gives you 360-degree coverage. Remember that they’re additive; as you scan off angle, you’re adding the two together in order to give you a homogeneous bubble – really like a force field of energy with five or six of these.

Once Leonidas is installed, it becomes a permanent way to generate an HPM shield that can go defend against any number of drones indefinitely at just the cost of electricity.

The Army has tested our HPM technology upways and downways with all their threats that are relevant to these fights overseas – not to mention the fights domestically starting to happen – and we have 100-percent effectiveness.

Final thoughts?

Epirus is a formidable neo prime or next-generation prime. We work directly with the government, DoD, international agencies, and foreign governments in order to employ one-to-many defensive systems that are geared toward high-value asset protection. That could be bases, military airfields, civilian airports, stadiums, and refineries. As we zoom in, there could be local protection for JLTVs, Strykers, Abrams tanks, and C-17 transports.

What we’ve, in fact, done is create a forcefield of sorts, which by nature is a one-to-many system that can effectively counter swarms, as well as attacks coming from the consumer electronics and the irregular/asymmetric warfare vectors.

In order to defend that adequately, we need to do a lot of ‘me too’ and ‘better than’ the other guys – like companies such as Anduril and Saronic are doing. We’ve got to keep up, but we also have to flip it on its head and create capabilities in areas where the United States still bears a strong advantage.

The folks at Epirus were largely trained by the primes. Many of us also have dual backgrounds in consumer electronics and big data. Our CTO has Waymo, Raytheon, and AFRL in his background. By fusing advanced technologies with bold thinking informed by decades of leadership at A&D primes, Epirus is positioned at the forefront of this new neo-prime ecosystem.

We’re thrilled to be part of the equation.