Letting the bats fly. (Digest).

April of this year saw the successful flight of Northrop Grumman's Bat (Brilliant Anti-armor Submunition) from a US Army Atacms carrier missile. The tests were preformed at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, with a view to demonstrating the performance of the Bat submunition against a moving array of armoured vehicles equipped with countermeasures. Some of the submunitions were fitted with warheads and some with flight data recorders to substantiate pre-test modelling and simulation projections. The autonomous Bat submunition uses a combination of passive acoustic and infrared sensors to seek, identify and destroy moving armoured targets, and it is currently in low-rate initial production at Northrop Grumman's Land Combat Systems facility.