The commandant of the Marine Corps Tuesday said the service’s MQ-9 Reaper drones have an electronic warfare pod that makes it “mostly undetectable” to opponent radars.
“What they bring with them is a sensing and making sense capability…some of the programs are classified. Some of the pods that go on our MQ-9s are classified, it’s called a T-SOAR pod. And what it does is it, I guess in the unclassed world…it can mimic things that are sent to it that it detects, turn it around and send it back so it becomes a black hole. It becomes mostly undetectable,” Marine Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said during an event at the Brooking Institution on July 2.
Smith was speaking in terms of how the MQ-9s aid the new Marine Littoral Regiments.
When pressed on what this means, Smith later said, “without crossing classification levels, it has the ability to somewhat disappear off of an enemy radar. I’ll just leave it at that.”
Smith declined to provide further details.
This system is seemingly related to the MQ-9’s Scalable Open Architecture Reconnaissance (SOAR) pod payload. MQ-9 builder General Atomics-Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI) describes the SOAR pod as providing long-range detection, identification, and location of radar and communications signals of interest.
“SOAR enables MQ-9 or other aircraft operators to provide standoff surveillance—seeing threats before threats can see the aircraft—and communicate actionable intelligence,” the company said on its website on the payload option.
An L3Harris Technologies fact sheet said it and GA-ASI jointly developed SOAR for use in Predator drones to provide long-range surveillance from persistent and low-cost unmanned aircraft systems.
A version of this story originally appeared in affiliate publication Defense Daily.