Jon Rambeau, president of the Integrated Mission Systems segment at L3Harris Technologies, speaks with National Security Editor Guy Taylor at the 2025 Reagan National Defense Forum about the global proliferation of cheaper, faster, and more deadly drones — and the U.S. defense industry’s push to develop more effective counter-drone systems for American military forces and their allies.
[TAYLOR] What can you tell me about the urgency of the threat facing militaries with regard to unmanned systems at this point?Â
[RAMBEAU] I think the best way really to put it out there is just to think about what we’re seeing in Ukraine today. And it’s really unprecedented. We’re seeing really three things. It’s about scale, it’s about speed, and it’s about cost, in the sense that we’re not seeing just small quantities of these drones, particularly the small ones. We’re seeing just vast quantities. So the numbers are very large. The speed at which they’re evolving. The hardware is evolving by the day. The software is evolving by the hour. So how do you stay ahead of that continuous evolution of capability? And then finally, cost. It’s one thing to be able to defeat one of these systems. But as you start to see those vast numbers that I talked about, how do you take them all out and do it at an affordable price point? The cost per kill or the cost per effect, it really has to be sort of commensurate with the threat itself.
[TAYLOR] So what is L3Harris doing to counter this?
[RAMBEAU] We’re trying to tackle it principally through a family of systems that go under the heading of Vampires. So, Vampire is a system that has been fielded in Ukraine, it’s been very successful. They’ve taken out hundreds of drone systems in combat. And we’ve continued to evolve the capability so that it’s modular in nature. We have non-kinetic effects, we have kinetic effects, and we’re able to put those together in different configurations to support different customers.Â
[TAYLOR] What about the speed of delivery of these systems? Ukraine is not the only conflict zone. How important is speed of, I’m going to say, basically big defense industry in delivering these counter-drawn assets?
[RAMBEAU] We’ve taken a commercial approach to it. So since we’ve started to see the success of the capability, we’ve started to build inventory in advance of orders. We were able to field systems for Ukraine in a matter of months. And we’re going to continue to pick up the pace. We have a new manufacturing facility now that we’re opening. And that’s going to have the capacity to do about 30 to 40 systems a month. And we’ve already started to build the inventory to push those out the door as the orders come in.Â
For more on the Reagan National Defense Forum
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