Rheinmetall reported on 19 August that HENSOLDT's Twinvis, a radar that locates aircraft by reading reflections of existing broadcast signals rather than transmitting its own, had been fused into Rheinmetall's Skymaster command system and used to drive a Skynex gun battery at the German Air Force exercise Timber Express 20261. Link 16, NATO's tactical data link, carried the common air picture between them.
Passive radar sits silent while a conventional fire-control set advertises the battery's location the moment it sweeps, and that silence is the advantage Rheinmetall is buying. Against cheap attack drones the transmitting side loses that trade badly, because a battery which gives itself away invites the next salvo. Twinvis finds the target without revealing the gun, so the Skynex position stays unknown until it fires. The integration work, rather than either box on its own, is what produces that: two manufacturers' equipment speaking through one command layer over a standard link.
Britain and Turkey signed the second agreement of the fortnight. BAE Systems, which unveiled Brontanax, Britain's first sovereign combat drone, in July, and the Turkish radio-frequency specialist TUALCOM signed a memorandum of understanding on 12 August to assess resilient communications, assured navigation and electronic warfare for future autonomous platforms serving UK, Turkish and export customers2. The work addresses the part of such an aircraft that fails first under contest. No money and no programme attach to the memorandum. What does attach is a shared judgement about where autonomous systems break under contest, and it is not the airframe.
