Warrior talks to EAGLE NXT about new drones for Army Counterdrone Wargaming by Kris Osborn, Warrior The Army's Joint Multi-National Readiness Center in Germany has acquired eBee Vision drones from a firm called EAGLE NXT to support ongoing wargaming activities designed, among other things, to help infantry and mechanized units defend against complex enemy drone attacks. As part of the C-UAS Series, Warrior talked to Steven Mathias, VP Global Business Development, EAGLE NXT about the merits of learning to defend against new generations of drone attacks. The ebee Vision drones are 4-pound fixed-wing small form-factor drones capable of infrared and electro-optical sensing and capable of operating in a GPS-denied environment. "We produce and develop high performance, small fixed-wing drones, so they are small UAS weighing four pounds. The ebee Vision can achieve 90 minutes of station time. They're man-packable and very easy to launch and recover. So this productgives the opposing force a capability that they need to highlight," Mathias told Warrior. The drone are being delivered to the JMRC in Hohenfels, Germany to support what the Army calls and "OPFOR," an opposing force designed specifically to wargame against Army units as a representative "enemy" force. The idea is to replicate technologies and tactics expected to be employed against the US Army in a potential conflict, through a key wargaming threat assessment process known as "Red Teaming." The Army uses OPFOR units extensively at places such as its National Training Center, Fort Irwin, Calif. to prepare its soldiers for the kind of future warfare they would confront in a conflict. These ebee Vision drones are engineered to replicate the kinds of weapons the US Army can expect to fight in a war against a sophisticated, great power adversary.
