Defence

Liteye to provide CaaS to US JCO

Posted 26 October 2022

Liteye System’s Inc. in partnership with SAIC, was recently selected by the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO) to provide approved Counter-UAS as a Service (CaaS) and hardware to the US Government.

Image courtesy Liteye

Liteye was chosen as a part of the SAIC team to protect fixed locations under the Counter-UAS as a Service (CaaS) model. CaaS is defined as Contractor Owned Government Operated (COGO) or Contractor Owned Contractor Operated (COCO) solutions enabling the Department to effectively detect, identify, track and defeat adversarial UAS’ while meeting critical affordability and funding realities.

In partnership with SAIC, Liteye successfully demonstrated its Counter Unmanned Arial Systems (C-UAS) capabilities and is now eligible to compete for future CaaS contract opportunities. Throughout the demonstration, the Liteye team was praised for its professionalism and performance.

The Liteye SHIELD system consists of the Spyglass radar system developed and manufactured by Numerica Corporation, along with HD EO/IR optics and RF Detection, Take-Over, and Defeat capabilities. The SHIELD system can operate as a stand-alone system, be remotely operated, or be integrated into a higher-level Command and Control solutions.

In response to the proliferation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAS) coupled with the threats to service members and critical infrastructure, the Department of Defense (DoD), in partnership with industry, is looking to acquire C-UAS via a CaaS model.

Col Greg Soule (US Army Retired), in an Army.mil article entitled 'Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Demonstration returns to Yuma Proving Ground' (27th April 2022) said: “The DoD normally buys things and owns it for the life cycle: you have to put it to rest at the end and in between, you have to maintain it and upgrade it as necessary…we could potentially pay an industry partner to perform this as a service to the DoD with the responsibility to maintain and upgrade it and to a certain extent operate it.”

Kenneth Geyer, Liteye CEO and Co-Founder said: “Liteye is honoured to be part of the SAIC team to provide a layered C-UAS solution to the DoD.

“As unmanned platforms proliferate the air and ground in the battlefield assuring these defensive systems and the teams that sustain them, are operational 24/7 and continuing to advance to meet the ever-evolving threat is mission-critical.”

As one of the DoD’s first C-UAS Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 9 companies, Liteye’s counter-drone systems have been protecting lives on the battlefield since 2016. Liteye has fielded cutting-edge solutions for over 20 years that enable the protection of critical infrastructure at home and around the world and the DoD’s CaaS model enables the DoD procurement models to evolve at the speed of the threat.