AGNES HELOU and CHRISTINA MACKENZIE
PARIS AIR SHOW — Like US military planners, the battles fought in Ukraine have thrown into sharp relief lessons for French defense contractor Thales, especially in the field of air defense, according to a senior executive there.
“The Ukrainian conflict showed that a wide spectrum of threats come from the skies [in] different sizes, from planes and helicopters to hypersonic missiles, and small and large drones, which we didn’t face in the past,” Thales executive vice president for land and air systems Christophe Salomon told Breaking Defense in an interview last week.
As such, Salomon said the company is working to expand its air defense offerings by integrating a new array of sensors to detect threats and countermeasures to defeat them efficiently.
“The integrated air defense system has an open architecture that connects all this equipment together, allowing us to integrate new sensors and effectors that we are in [the] process of developing now,” Salomon said.
The idea of air defenses working efficiently is especially a priority. For example, Salomon noted the interest in directed energy weapons that the company is developing “in order to counter these [UAV] threats, knowing it is not feasible and cost effective to destroy a threat costing €10,000 with a €1 million missile.”
Salomon said the company is “also in the process of developing new products to counter ballistic missiles through HF — high frequency bands.”
“With these kind of missiles there is a very short time to respond, and the sooner the detection, the more time we have for reaction. Hence, we are developing the UHF wavefront (Ultra high frequency) family,” he said.
Salomon was speaking to Breaking Defense at this year’s Paris Air Show where Thales was showing off a key element of integrated air defense: radar. Specifically, the company was advertising its Ground Master 200 MM/A, an upgraded version of the Ground Master 200 that was sent to Ukraine with much fanfare.
The system is designed not only to identify targets, but to identify what available defense weapons are best positioned to take them out, by passing data from a radar operator’s screen to a weapons operator’s tablet. The MM/A upgrade increases the range of the system by some 100 kilometers over the 250-kilometer range of its predecessor, the company said, and provides better precision at long distance and resolution than the GM200.
“This makes a huge difference on the area covered by the radar,” a Thales engineer told Breaking Defense.
The engineer said that the MM/A radar, its mast, power generator unit and operational air-conditioned cabin for two operators are all contained in a 20-foot shelter that is transportable by truck, just like the GM200.
“The radar can be operational 13 minutes from the moment the truck stops and deploys its outriggers,” the engineer said, adding with a smile, “Well, 15 minutes if you haven’t done it before.” And it can pack up and scamper off in 10 minutes if it becomes clear that its position has been compromised.
The first GM-200 MM/A should be available from 2024, Salomon said.
Alongside the upgraded radar, Thales advertised a counter-UAV system known as PARADE, which Salomon said can be integrated into the larger air defense system and has been chosen by the French government to help protect the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
The air defense offerings have caught the attention of buyers, especially in the Middle East, Salomon said, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — countries that have not been shy in recent years about improving their air defense capabilities.
Of PARADE specifically, Salomon said the company has “propose[d] this configuration to many partners and different versions of the system whereby the country chooses different effectors like the drone to counter drones with a net, direct laser weapons, and we are discussing that with different partners in the Middle East.”
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