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David Donald

European weapons specialist MBDA has made considerable strides in developing its Orchestrike collaborative weapons artificial intelligence (AI) concept since its unveiling last year at the Paris Air Show. At Farnborough, the company has announced that it will initially be applied to its Spear family of precision strike weapons, and is demonstrating the new capability in a digital-twin simulator.
Spear weapons offer the advanced mission planning and long-range complex multi-weapon mission capabilities found in the latest heavy cruise missiles, but are packaged into a weapon that can be carried in significant numbers by multirole fighters. The F-35, for instance, can accommodate up to eight in its internal weapon bays. The Spear can strike moving targets in all weather and at long stand-off ranges, making it an ideal defense suppression weapon.
Orchestrike enhances the Spear’s performance and capabilities by adding AI-driven coordination and cooperation between multiple missiles and the launch aircraft. The inherent AI features allow the missiles and pilot to collaboratively react to threats and to solve tactical challenges—such as reassigning priority targets in the case of missiles being intercepted, in turn improving the survivability of both missiles and launch platform, and overall mission success rate. At all times the weapons operate only within the boundaries of human operator input.
MBDA’s recent development work has focused on refining the AI algorithms and advancing the missile-to-missile datalinks, while also looking at integration between the two elements and into the Spear itself. Orchestrike is planned for other network-enabled weapon systems in the future.

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MBDA has made considerable strides in developing its Orchestrike collaborative weapons artificial intelligence (AI) concept since it was first unveiled in 2023 at the Paris Air Show

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