TWZ
The U.S. Army has picked AeroVironment to supply a new anti-air interceptor, primarily to provide an additional layer of defense against longer-range one-way attack drones and other similarly-sized uncrewed aerial systems (UAS). Designed to be relatively low-cost and easy to produce, the Freedom Eagle-1 (FE-1) missile could also be employed against other aerial threats, including subsonic cruise missiles, in certain circumstances.
In a press release earlier today, AeroVironment announced that the FE-1 had been selected as the winning design for what the Army has been calling the Next-Generation C-UAS Missile (NGCM). The company has also now received a contract from the service valued at $95.9 million for FE-1s, which has come through a related effort called the Long-Range Kinetic Interceptor (LRKI).
