Senior U.S. Army ground forces commanders watched nervously as a swarm of drones advanced toward them. Forty-nine drones flying at high speed in perfect coordination presented a difficult threat to counter. Beads of sweat appeared on their foreheads in the Arizona desert heat. Then the operator pressed a button and a high-powered microwave beam was fired at the swarm, bringing all of them down at once. “It fried them,” as the common phrase goes.
That 2024 event was a demonstration of the Leonidas defense system by the U.S. company Epirus, showcasing the capabilities of high-power microwave technology, or HPM. Early this year, the company again demonstrated that a mobile version of Leonidas could down a fiber-optic drone, similar to the first-person view (FPV) drones Hezbollah has used in recent months. The question now is increasingly relevant for the IDF: are HPM systems the ultimate answer to FPV drones?
In recent months, Israel’s security establishment has come to view the drone threat as a strategic challenge, with implications for deterrence, defense spending and, above all, soldiers’ lives. Fiber-optic drones, difficult to detect and immune to jamming because they remain physically connected to their operators by cable, have killed and wounded numerous soldiers and officers.
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