Defeating threats
Brian M Walters
Saab Avitronics (CON 5 Swedish Pavilion) brings news of the latest endeavours to defeat threats to light and medium combat vehicles. The fruit of research and development in Saab’s South African facility, Land Electronic Defence System (LEDS) is said to have a unique capability to ultimately provide MBT-level protection to such vehicles. But that will be in a few years hence when the highest-level LEDS-300 becomes available to defeat kinetic energy and stand-off threats.
Meanwhile, the lowest level LEDS-50 system is the basic building block, comprising sensors, which is in full production and has been sold to the Dutch, Swedish and South African Armies. Switzerland and Jordan have also acquired the LEDS-50 for evaluation. But the company reports growing interest from countries that need to provide improved protection for their mobile units.
The concept of LEDS is to combine soft-kill, hard-kill and active signature management to provide hemispherical and full spectrum active protection for vehicles shown to be vulnerable in Iraq and Afghanistan. Weapons such as the RPG-7, anti-tank guns, missiles and artillery shells have underlined the inadequacy of widely used armour, so Saab Avitronics is motivated to bring the five levels of LEDS to market as soon as possible.
LEDS-50 consists of a sensor suite, central active defence controller and a high-speed directed launcher. These elements will support countermeasure options ranging from fast-deploying multispectral smoke, active signature management devices and decoys to hard-kill devices to defeat incoming threats. The system will interface with existing onboard defensive aids, with LEDS pulling them all together.
|