The Marine Corps will field an advanced smart scope that is designed to hit moving targets in order to help Marines shoot down small drones, said Lt. Col. Eric Flanagan, a spokesman for Combat Development and Integration.
Starting next fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1, Marine units will begin receiving the SMASH 2000L advanced fire control system, Flanagan told Task & Purpose on Wednesday.
“The SMASH 2000L will give the rifleman the ability to quickly obtain a positive firing solution and increase their probability of kill when engaging Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” Flanagan said. “The SMASH 2000L provides easily attachable components that will enable a standard M4 to be utilized for targeting and defeating [small unmanned aerial systems] with conventional small arms fire while still enabling the Marine user to utilize that same weapon system to engage other/ground targets.”
The Marine Corps plans to buy the first SMASH 2000L systems “within the coming months,” said Flanagan, who declined to say exactly how many systems the Corps is purchasing due to operational security.
“Multiple units across all elements of the [Marine Air-Ground Task Force] will receive this technology with priority going to those units that are deployed or deploying soon,” Flanagan said.
The SMASH 2000L can be mounted on M4 carbines, and it functions as a regular red dot sight until the shooter decides to use the optic’s fire control system, Scott Thompson, vice president and general manager of SMARTSHOOTER Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli company that makes the system.
Once shooters identify a target, they can press a button and the SMASH 2000L will perform the necessary ballistic calculations, and the system will not allow a round to be released until the computer determines the most opportune moment to hit the target, Thompson told Task & Purpose.
The system continues to update the targeting solution, allowing the shooter to hit a moving target, Thompson said. It also compensates for the shooter’s own movement. Shooters can unlock the system to fire at will if needed.
“If you’re in a dismounted environment and you need to switch to drone mode, it’s very simple,” Thompson said. “It’s just a double click of a button atop of the optic, and you move automatically into drone mode. Instead of a ground target, you’re now looking for a much smaller center of mass to engage, i.e. a drone.”
Marines Corps officials told Task & Purpose in October 2021 that the Corps was testing the SMASH 2000L for Marines to use against drones. Now, deploying Marine units will be equipped with the optic along with other systems that are designed to defeat small drones.
“One of the things that is apparent to all of us is that unmanned aerial systems are a threat not just to infantry Marines, but to all Marines,” Lt. Gen. Eric Austin, deputy commandant for combat development and integration, said in April.
The Army and Marine Corps both need countermeasures for small drones because the threat is immediate, said retired Marine Col. Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“We see in Ukraine that those threats exist now — not in the future,” Cancian told Task & Purpose on Wednesday. “All militaries are watching this and will be developing small drones — many of them already have them. It will be inevitable that Marines and soldiers will see these on the battlefield.”
In Ukraine, small drones have a “ubiquitous” presence on the front lines, he said. The Ukrainians are using these drones as artillery rounds, and they are burning through between 10,000 to 20,000 of such drones a week.
Both Ukraine and Israel have also launched daring attacks recently using swarms of small drones. In both cases, the drones were covertly launched within Russia and Iran, respectively, and they destroyed aircraft and missile launchers well behind the frontlines.
The proliferation of small drones has created “giant kill boxes” that stretch 20 kilometers in either direction of the frontlines in Ukraine, said Colin Smith, a senior international and defense researcher with the RAND Corporation
At this point, any potential adversary could use short-range small drones to threaten individual Marines and lightly armored vehicles, underscoring the need for countermeasures that can jam or destroy the unmanned aerial systems, Smith said.
“The advantage of something that can shoot a small drone relatively accurately is better than hauling around something that needs a lot of battery power,” Smith said.
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