Leonardo DRS Successfully Completes First Open-Water Demonstration of its Counter-UAS Maritime Mission Equipment Package for Small Uncrewed Surface Vessels

Published on August 13, 2025

Leonardo DRS, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRS) announced today that is has successfully completed its first series of open-water demonstrations of its advanced maritime Mission Equipment Package (MEP) for counter‑UAS (C‑UAS) naval fleet protection.

The DRS maritime MEP is a scalable C-UAS system based on DRS’s proven land-based mobile short-range air defense and C-UAS systems. This system is designed to be mounted on a range of small uncrewed surface vessels providing remote ship protection at varying distances, providing a real solution as the Navy looks to autonomous surface vessels to protect ships from air and surface threats.

The initial demonstrations were conducted under realistic sea conditions and demonstrated the MEP’s core integrated systems performance – the detection, identification and tracking of a UAS threat and counter-surface ship tracking. The mission equipment package used in the demonstration included a suite of DRS sensors and command-and-control technologies including the BlackLab passive radio frequency (RF) detection system, STAG electro-optic/infrared (EO/IR) gimbal with advanced thermal cameras, and a tactical data management system using DRS’s sensor fusion operating system and AI to support fusion and target recognition using RF and Optical modalities.

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