The U.S. Army Needs More Anti-Aircraft Weapons — and Fast

Recent conflicts in Armenia, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine have demonstrated the widespread adoption of drones by state actors — as well as rebel and terrorist groups — for reconnaissance purposes and as improvised attack platforms carrying grenades or explosive charges. Most recently, Russian air-defense vehicles and electronic-warfare assets in Syria reportedly defeated a simultaneous rebel attack by 13 kamikaze drones.

To counter such threats, U.S. troops needs fast-reacting short-range air defense systems, or SHORADS — and better yet, they need them in a package that can move with frontline units on the battlefield, which the Army dubs “Maneuver SHORADS.”

For decades the U.S. military has counted on fighter jets to achieve air supremacy, and focused land-based defenses on long-range Patriot missiles as a counter to tactical ballistic missiles. But while long-range missiles and patrolling jet fighters may be able to engage a few drones at a time, both are impractical to employ against large numbers of tiny systems that might be dramatically cheaper than the missiles used to destroy them.

In many cases, fighters and long-range SAMs will also simply be to far away to intervene against such small, low-flying threats in time, particularly if they are targeting front-line troops.

But this leaves the U.S. Army in a pinch. Since 2004 it has drastically downsized its SHORADS force from 26 battalions in 2004 to just nine, only two of them active-duty, and phased out its last armored anti-aircraft system, the M6 Linebacker.

The Linebacker was a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle, a 27-ton heavily armed tracked troop carrier, with its TOW anti-tank missile launcher swapped out for a four-round Stinger missile system, with eight reloads in the hull. The heat-seeking FIM-92 Stinger became famous in the 1980s when the United States smuggled hundreds of the missiles to mujahideen insurgents in Afghanistan, who used them to cripple the Soviet Union’s helicopter-centric counterinsurgency campaign.

The fire-and-forget missiles home in on the heat signature of an aircraft, and can strike targets up to three to five miles away while traveling over twice the speed of sound.

Placing the Stinger on an armored vehicle allowed it to accompany mechanized and tank formations on offensive operations while affording more protection. The Linebacker retained the Bradley’s 25-millimeter autocannon for ground engagements, which has limited application against low-flying helicopters.