NASHVILLE — AeroVironment (AV) today announced its new line of launched effects systems, dubbed MAYHEM, which the company describes as autonomous capabilities that can be deployed from air, ground and sea platforms.
The first capability unveiled in this line, MAYHEM 10, has a 10 lb. payload and is interchangeable, allowing the system to support both lethal and nonlethal missions, Brian Young, senior vice president of loitering munitions at AV said in a roundtable prior to the announcement. For instance, he said it can support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, electronic warfare, precision strike and communications relay. He explained that the system can have multiple payloads to include the various mission sets simultaneously.
“You think about in today’s world, you’ve got a number of different real world operations, a number of different types of targets on the battlefield, and you might have to do a number of different things to address those targets in a very dynamic way,” Young told reporters Monday. “So we’ve built a system that has the open interfaces and the multi-mission payload sets that can address each one of those threats in a collaborative way.”
The importance of being able to switch the mission sets of the system is paramount to successfully fighting in today’s threat environment, Young said, adding that the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict is proof.
“You can build an unconfigured air vehicle, and at the end of the production line you can add the different capabilities that you want to within a matter of days, rather than a matter of months, to get that out to the battlefield, as all of these different hardware and software solutions, as we’ve seen in Ukraine, are iterating in a matter of days and weeks, sometimes not even months,” he said.
Young explained that the MAYHEM 10 was inspired by its “sister system” the Switchblade 400, a product in the company’s line of loitering munitions introduced last fall. The MAYHEM 10 has up to a 100 km operational range, can fly for 50 minutes and uses a modular open systems approach developed by Parry Labs, a company that cultivates the infrastructure for digital systems.
AV also partnered with Applied Intuition for the system’s “collaborative attack” technology otherwise known as swarming, Young said. The companies have yet to test the swarming functions, but AV spokesperson BJ Koubaroulis, a spokesperson for AV, told reporters such testing will occur in “late summer.”
Young added that one of the main goals of the MAYHEM 10 is to be an anti-amour weapon, adding that it has the ability to fit the Javelin Multi Purpose Warhead on it, similar to how it’s incorporated into the Switchblade 600. Down the line he also foresees the system being integrated into ground systems, as the Switchblades 300 and 600 have done as well.
AV has been developing the MAYHEM 10 for the past “couple years” Young said, adding that it will enter low-rate initial production this calendar year. During low-rate initial production, the company estimates it will produce about 10 units per month, and eventually the goal is to ramp up to full rate production producing 100 units per month. But that could be “years away,” Young said. The company currently does not have any active orders for the system but Young said he foresees it being popular among the Army and Marine Corps, especially for the Army’s launched effects short-range effort.
“We’ve been talking about the capability with those customers for a while, and certainly see paths to orders across many different customers not too long from now,” Young said.
Young said down the line, there is potential for the MAYHEM family to enter the recently launched Army-owned drone marketplace, if and when the service decides to add launched effects to the Amazon-like platform. There is also the possibility that the lines could be a part of the Defense Department’s Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG) program, which took the place of the Replicator program — the Biden-era program that aimed to acquire thousands of low-cost attritable drones.
But before any of those decisions are made, Young said the company is in conversations to determine what the payload sizes for the next editions of the MAYHEM lines will be.
“The launched effects program has built in different size systems into its requirement. So you have short range, medium range and long range within that, and so we look at kind of that entire set of capabilities specifically for the Army. But then even outside of that, as being able to branch out into the future, much like Switchblade did, going from Switchblade 300 to 600 and then 400, you’d see a similar build out of mayhem products,” Young said.
