14-05-2025
Canada's boutique military: 'Should we not be able to defend ourselves?'
'On top of the turret of this thing is a rotating radar dish (that can detect incoming drones),' he said. 'It's a lot like a naval gun on a land vehicle, and they're very effective at shooting down drones.'
The Ukrainians have modified their Neptune anti-ship missile — its original version sank the Russian Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva in April 2022 — and fired it recently against Russian oil refineries.
'It has a range of 1,000 kilometres,' Hansen said. 'It is flying to co-ordinates that cannot be jammed. It has to be shot down. And good luck with that, because it flies at about 900 miles an hour.'
Drone technology and weapons to counter them are something 'we can't afford not to learn,' Boivin said. The brigade now in Latvia has some weapons aimed at countering the threat from incoming drones by jamming their sensors or shooting them down, said the commander.
'We've got some that are still to be delivered in order to give us the capabilities to address threats from unmanned aerial systems.'
Last summer, Canada awarded three 'Diamond in the rough' cash prizes to companies making equipment to detect and defeat such threats. Vancouver's AIM Defence took home the million-dollar first prize. Sherbrooke, Que.'s DARIT Technologies, and Toronto's Prandtl Dynamics tied for second place in the contest — dubbed a Sandbox event at Alberta's CFB Suffield — that featured 15 outfits from five countries demonstrating and testing their counter-drone technologies.
