Can RTX Solve America’s Drone Crisis?

“Drones” were in the headlines again this week — and for millions of Americans up and down the East Coast, maybe also over-head.

As far north as New York to as far south as Florida — and as far west as an Air Force base in Ohio, too — unidentified flying objects (UFOs) that appear to be a mix of formation-flying quadcopter and fixed-wing drones have been reported buzzing American skies. The FBI and Homeland Security insist this is all bunk, that there’s “no evidence” that drones “pose a national security or public safety threat,” and that the things people are seeing may not even be drones at all but rather misidentified private and commercial aircraft.

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Regardless, citizens are worried and politicians are irate. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has asked the White House to send “special drone-detection tech” to monitor the airways in New York and New Jersey. Governor Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) wants a “state-of-the-art drone detection system” for her state. In the meantime, the Federal Aviation Administration has banned flying drones over large swathes of central and northern New Jersey for the next month.

Buy American or buy Dutch?

Obviously, that’s untenable as a long-term solution. Drones are part of everyday life now, from families unwrapping DJI drones at Christmas to companies using drones to inspect crop health and cellphone tower repairs. Rather than banning their use entirely, we really need a solution that tells us who’s flying around up there.

Sen. Schumer and Gov. Hochul favor buying an “IRIS” radar system from Dutch company Robin Radar Systems, already in use in Ukraine to detect Russian drones. This small radar is described as having a 360-degree field of view and being able to detect flying objects to a range of 3 miles. But here’s the thing:

We don’t need to import radar systems from the Netherlands to solve this problem. There’s a made-in-America solution already available.

(Re) introducing JLENS

I’m talking about JLENS, the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System that RTX Corporation (NYSE: RTX) developed for the U.S. military back in the early 20-teens. Designed primarily for missile defense, the U.S. Army describes JLENS as being able to detect “all fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and land attack cruise missiles,” and even “surface moving targets, large caliber rockets, and tactical ballistic missiles.”

Like IRIS, JLENS provides a 360-degree field of view, but with significant advantages over IRIS. In contrast to the Dutch system, which sits on the ground, JLENS aerostats float two miles up in the air, extending their horizon such that a single JLENS “can track multiple threats simultaneously up to a range of 340 miles.” Moreover, unlike the civilian IRIS system, JLENS possesses fire-control radars among its suite of sensors and can direct active weapons systems to target and destroy threats as they’re identified.

Image source: U.S. Army.

Time to reactivate JLENS?

Admittedly, JLENS is not currently an active U.S. military program. In 2015, a JLENS system stationed at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland broke loose from its ground tether and began wandering aimlessly around the Eastern seaboard, frustrating law enforcement efforts to bring it down to Earth. By 2016, Congress had zeroed out funding, effectively canceling the JLENS project here in the U.S.

Internationally, however, JLENS may still be active — perhaps in the Netherlands’ own backyard. Just earlier this year, the Pentagon informed Congress of a request by Poland to purchase multiple aerostat systems for missile defense. While not referred to by the “JLENS” name, these aerostats appear to be in the same line of work as JLENS — and RTX was named as the principal defense contractor on the sale.

JLENS versus IRIS

Assuming the U.S. decides to invest in military technology to get its drone situation under control, JLENS seems to me a more cost-effective solution than IRIS, although it may not seem so at first.

Details of a 2022 U.K. contract suggest IRIS costs about $300,000 per year to operate versus JLENS costing $235 million to purchase. At first, that may seem to make IRIS the budget-conscious choice for drone control, but consider:

JLENS’s 340-radius range of detection, across a 360-degree field of view, encompasses some 363,000 square miles of coverage. (The cubic volume of coverage would be even greater.) To cover a similar area with IRIS’s 3-mile range (and 113-mile area of coverage) would require setting up more than 3,000 separate IRIS radars…at a total cost of more than $960 million.

Just thinking mathematically, therefore, it appears to me that JLENS offers significantly more bang for the buck than does IRIS. In addition, JLENS is a made-in-the-U.S.A. product, benefiting U.S. companies, which IRIS is not and does not.

And if buying JLENS helps to accelerate RTX’s 10% long-term projected growth rate and makes RTX stock a bit more attractive a buy than its 33 price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio makes it appear today, then for investors, that would certainly be another argument in favor of buying JLENS.

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