RTX [RTX] said on Jan. 29 that the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the company’s Raytheon business unit have finished a three week field test of the Counter-Electronic High-Power Microwave Extended-Range Air Base Air Defense (CHIMERA) at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
“During the test, CHIMERA applied directed energy to multiple static target variations and demonstrated end-to-end fire control by acquiring and tracking aerial targets and maintaining tracking for the entire flight path,” RTX said.
AFRL announced CHIMERA almost four years ago as a “longer-range, higher power system to address some of the threats that might be coming at our air bases,” and said it was to deliver in fiscal year 2020 (
Defense Daily, March 21, 2019).
Defense of U.S. bases is in the spotlight after an Iranian kamikaze drone on Jan. 28 killed three U.S. Army soldiers at the Tower 22 installation in northeast Jordan near Syria.
CHIMERA “was built to fire highly concentrated radio energy at multiple middle-to-long-range targets,” RTX said. “The ground-based demonstration system wields more power than other HPM [high-power microwave] systems to defeat airborne threats at the speed of light.”
Colin Whelan, Raytheon’s president of advanced technologies, said in the RTX statement that “high-power microwave systems are cost-effective and reliable solutions that play an important role in layered defense by increasing magazine depth and giving warfighters more options to defeat adversaries quickly.”
U.S. Central Command’s Air Forces Central (AFCENT) component has said that one of the efforts of AFCENT’s Combined Task Force 99 has been to develop and field non-kinetic, counter small UAS systems that U.S. military forces are able to re-use.