For well over a decade, weapon designers around the world have been seeking to solve the battlefield threat posed by short range, hand launched missiles. This includes rocket propelled grenades or RPG’s who use has skyrocketed and proliferated over the last 30 years.
Active Protection Systems currently deployed or in testing have included systems like the Israeli Trophy, Iron Fist, Raytheon’s Quick Kill system, and many others all with varying degrees of success, and failure. Indeed the US failed to accept delivery of the trophy system owing to its propensity for killing friendly soldiers with its crude shotgun blast approach to interception. The Raytheon system while more complex and less lethal to friendly troops, was extremely expensive and not entirely effective. It was dubbed the “5 miracles” by congressional aides during its testing on the cancelled Army FCS initiative, owing to its enormously complex firing mechanism.
The Team at CPI has created a concept for Active Protection that has none of these drawbacks.
- Extremely cost effective to build as it is based on simple hardware and munitions concepts, and integration with existing detection system technology.
- Non-Lethal to local troops. No tactical changes required for field deployment on tanks and armoured vehicles.
- First system to be truly viable for Helicopter active protection.