Urban warfare sniper drone could root out ISIS like fighters in future battles

Fiscal Times:
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Now a Florida company is building an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designed specifically for the urban combat that many military thinkers see as the future of warfare – the sort of house-by-house battles being fought to re-capture Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq from the Islamic State.

Related: The Marines’ Newest Weapon: 3-D Printed Drones

Reuters said Thursday that a few hundred ISIS militants in Mosul are making a desperate last stand in the “Old City’s maze of alleyways,” with suicide bombers being employed as the eight-month siege nears its end.

Routing them without endangering ground troops is exactly the sort of scenario for which the TIKAD, built by Duke Robotics, is designed.

The small, multi-prop drone can be fitted with an assault weapon, a grenade launcher or a sniper rifle mounted on a rotating gimbal. The military website Defense One says that the TIKAD has a proprietary stabilization system that compensates for recoil when weapons are fired from it remotely.

The Duke website says the “technology also allows us to shoot remotely and potentially disarm a situation without ever deploying a ground presence.”

Defense One quoted Duke co-founder and CEO Raziel Atuar as saying: “I can mount an M4, SR25, a 40-millimeter grenade launcher … I can carry up to 22 pounds and [the system] will stabilize the drone and allow me to get an accurate shot.”
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From Mosul to Raqqa this weapons system could save lives as it roots out ISIS fighters waiting to ambush approaching troops. It needs to be quite for such operations and it needs to also have a long enough time over target to be really effective.

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