Ukraine’s Latest Drone-Killer Is A Truck Firing Surplus Air-to-Air Missiles

Given the scale of Russian missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities and bases—thousands of strikes a month all across Ukraine—Ukrainian forces need all the surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs, they can get.

The latest system, the Raven, is a strange one: a medium truck armed with surplus dogfighting missiles. The Raven’s weirdness is by design.

“It’s an amazing system which combines the HMT 600 Supacat vehicle with an advanced short-range air-to-air missile, the ASRAAM missile,” said Royal Marines Col. Olly Todd from the British military’s Task Force Kindred, which develops weapons for Ukraine.

The U.K. has shipped eight Ravens to Ukraine; five more are on the way. The type has been shooting down Russian drones since at least 2023 but only recently made its public debut in official videos.

The eclectic mix of sensors, launchers and missiles that the Ukrainian military inherited from the Soviet Union, acquired locally or received as donations from its foreign allies posed a problem as Russia widened its war on Ukraine in 2022. The various components weren’t always designed to work together. A particular radar might not be compatible with a particular missile, which in turn might not work with a particular launcher.

The U.K. Defense Ministry got to work kluging together the disparate hardware as early as 2022. In 2023, the U.S. Defense Department followed suit with its “FrankenSAM” initiative, a nod to Doctor Frankenstein’s pieced-together monster. The Ukrainian defense ministry also runs a parallel effort.

The challenge is integration: getting mismatched sensors, missiles and launchers to work as one system. To produce the Raven, British engineers yanked old missile rails off retired Royal Air Force fighter jets and bolted them to the Supacat trucks. Simple camera gimbals on the trucks’ tops, controlled by modified video game controllers, point the launch rails and their 200-pound ASRAAM missiles toward incoming targets.

Once launched, an infrared-guided ASRAAM steers itself toward a nearby heat source. The missile ranges as far as 15 miles. Todd declared the Raven “one of the most effective short-range air-defense systems in use in Ukraine at the moment.”

There are many other FrankenSAMs in Ukrainian service, including Soviet-made vehicles firing old American-made infrared- and radar-guided air-to-air missiles, as well as Soviet vehicles firing Soviet air-to-air missiles that no one thought to launch from the ground until the current war.

The proliferation of FrankenSAMs has mostly produced shorter-ranged air defenses, however—and that makes sense, as the most abundant air-to-air missiles range just tens of miles. Ukraine’s most urgent need is for long-range surface-to-air missiles that can protect cities and bases from the most powerful Russian ballistic missiles.

Only two systems, the American Patriot and the European SAMP/T, fit this bill. While a few Patriot missile launchers may have been integrated with old Soviet radars, almost all of Ukraine’s eight or so long-range SAM batteries are purebred designs, not FrankenSAMs.