Almost three years ago, the Pentagon's Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO) recommended Science Applications International Corp.'s layered counter-drone system as one of three vendor-provided solutions that the services and combatant commands looked at when considering the deployment of counter-UAS-as-a-service at an installation.
Since that time, SAIC is still trying to find a contract opportunity with the Army for the system, having run into budget-related challenges in one instance.
SAIC’s CUAS system uses the Valkyrie command and control system for “fixed, semi-fixed, and dismounted configurations,” according to the company. The open-architecture C2 software can integrate more than 40 sensors and effectors across more than 20 hardware providers.
SAIC’s system can detect, track, identify, engage and defeat targets, while also assessing battle damage, according to the company. The goal is to provide “interoperable solutions” that can be tailored across multiple domains, Greg Fortier, senior vice president of the Army business group at SAIC, told Inside Defense last week.
The JCO issued its counter-UAS-as-a-service (CaaS) recommendation in September 2022, noting that SAIC had “developed and demonstrated a robust” architecture that consisted of layered sensors and effectors “to cover long range to mobile last-line-of-defense short range.” The office also recommended Anduril and Black Sage Technologies to serve as possible vendors of CaaS.
Fortier, speaking ahead of this week’s Association of the U.S. Army Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, AL, said the JCO recommendation was “an evaluation entity to see how advanced the tech was, how advanced the solutions were, and then who could perform the services.”
“Now, since that time, we have only had one opportunity to pursue and that was within the Marine Corps, and that was installation counter UAS opportunity that just was released and we’re getting a debrief on that as we speak to understand the results of that,” he said.
SAIC hasn’t had any contract opportunities yet with the Army or Air Force for its CUAS system. But Fortier said about two years ago, the Army’s Program Executive Office for Missiles and Space tapped SAIC for a pilot program that involved gathering data on integrated CUAS at installations.
Congress recently passed a yearlong continuing resolution that experts say reduces the Pentagon’s buying power, and Fortier said the inability to get more money in the budget in recent years has put the brakes on pilot programs such as that one.
“Unfortunately, the budget fights over the last couple of years have swallowed up some of those dollars, so we’re anxiously awaiting what the CR’s going to say and whether that’s funded or not. Whether we can move forward on that. But in the run up to those tasks, we did a small, medium and large demonstration, or at least a prototype of how we would protect those sites,” he said.
Because of the frequency of stopgap funding measures in Washington, SAIC has an internal process by which it decides whether to continue with a particular program it’s involved in, Fortier explained.
“Any time you're dealing in any budgetary environment, whether there's a full year budget or whether there's a CR, there’s a fine line between what we're going to invest as a Fortune 500 company on our own dime to continue along the prototyping phase, continue to iterate in terms of making our technology best of breed, and identifying the best of breed technologies, and then waiting to see what's funded and what opportunities we're going to go into attack,” he said.