THOR is the new weapon in USAF arsenal to take out swarms of drones -

In the past few years, small sized ones have started to emerge onto the battlefields where they are performing jobs such as surveying the US army forces as well as making bombing drops on them. With this new threat, the US army has been trying to come up with new methods to deal with them.

Earlier this month, the US Air Force came up with a unique new tool. This new tool is a high-powered microwave system that has been named as the Tactical High Power Microwave Operational Responder or in its short form THOR.

THOR will soon be installed over all the US bases around the globe and will be sued to effectively protect these bases from attacks of small drones.

THOR has been developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory located at the Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. THOR will emit high-powered microwave short bursts to disable any kind of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles).

According to the local media sources, this system has been developed after the hard work of nearly 18 months for a budget cost of 15 million dollars. Being able to run on a generator it is easy to be stored inside a shipping container making its transportation anywhere in the world easy and efficient. THOR can be installed and in running condition within a span of a few hours.

The testing for THOR was started by USAF in this spring and they are also currently working on another system by the name CHIMERA which is a Counter-Electronic High-Power Microwave Extended-Range Air Base Air Defense. CHIMERA will be designed for taking down things from medium to along range and its delivery is expected sometime in the coming year.

With a drone being small in size, it is hard to target one down with conventional guns with the problem of the resulting falling debris to inure people if they are flying over them.

US military has been looking on to various other such systems and had already invested in another project by Lockheed Martin that was started in August of 2018. Other departments of the US defense sector are long into defensive systems such as laser systems to take down both drones and missiles.