This weapon sounds very cool, and it is a real life version of exactly what I was talking about in my ‘drone archer’ post. With a UAV like this, you could give a platoon or squad some very interesting options on the battlefield.
The first one that came to my mind, was the idea of taking advantage of these small little engagements with the enemy. If you can keep an enemy machine gunner or whomever busy with return fire, you could have two or three drone archers flying TiGERs right on top of the guy in order to solve that problem. Better yet, you could use these TiGERs up to two miles away and solve problems from strategically positioned drone archers with access to a ‘quiver team’ (truck load of TiGERs and support crew). These crews could also fly TiGERs up to the front line to feed the drone archers plenty of arrows to use.
What I really liked though, was the guidance systems. Supposedly it has GPS guidance, and you can use the camera in the nose for more precise targeting or last minute changes to an attack. That is crucial, because if your target is running or tries to fool the drone archer, the TiGER could be stopped last minute and then flown back up for another attempt at a kamikazi attack. With precision guidance and a ‘top down attack’ with a small one pound warhead, I would also say that collateral damage is minimized to the extreme. That would make this a good COIN weapon. And hey, it still has a camera which makes it a standard UAV as well.
Swarming these things is another option that would take some figuring out. If the company created a bunch of practice TiGERs, then military units could experiment in exercises about how best to use these things. I really think some radical platoon and squad level tactics could evolve from the use of such a weapon. It is also cool that the company is putting some ‘elephant chisel’ mechanisms on the TiGER and I would be very interested if the feeds are encrypted or not.
Finally, I would not be surprised if MBDA has a mobile application to integrate this drone with an iPhone or similar device. Tactical Life did mention that laptops or handhelds are being considered. That would put this weapon on the PMC 2.0 list. –Matt
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TiGER Tactical Grenade Extended Range. Photo by Tactical Life.
TiGER Tactical Grenade Extended Range
TiGER is a small, man-portable, hand-launched, extended-range weapon designed for a rapid response employment to protect deployed troops.