The U.S. Army recently completed a live-fire test of a new "bunker breach" weapon at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. It combines a powerful bunker-penetrating warhead with a disposable attack drone. It is regarded as an important attempt to integrate traditional heavy ammunition with drone combat modes.
The so-called "bunker bomb" The buster is essentially a weapon based on the idea of "breaking through with brute force". It uses an extremely strong and heavy projectile to fall or be projected from high altitude at high speed, penetrate several meters or even tens of meters of soil and concrete, and then detonate deep in the target, causing a destructive effect similar to a small earthquake. This concept can be traced back to the trebuchets used for sieges in the Middle Ages. In modern times, it attracted widespread attention during the 1991 Gulf War. At that time, the multinational coalition filled the excess 8-inch howitzer barrels with high explosives and dropped improvise from high altitudes into bunker bombs, which were used to destroy underground facilities of the Iraqi army.
The BRAKER (full name "Bunker Rupture and Kinetic Explosive Round") tested this time is the latest generation product of this idea, and it is highly integrated with the rapid development of drone technology in recent years. The U.S. military emphasized that it took only 14 days for the BRAKER prototype to be launched from concept to live firing, reflecting the military's new orientation in rapid iteration of weapons and agile research and development.
According to the Army, such a high development speed is due to two key technologies: one is the use of additive manufacturing (3D printing) to rapidly form the warhead shell; the other is the use of a standardized interface called the Picatinny Common Lethality Integration Kit (CLIK) to plug-and-play integration of various types of ammunition with different drone platforms. With the help of this set of universal interfaces, the US military successfully used a drone equipped with a BRAKER warhead to attack and hit a simulated bunker target on March 26.
From the configuration point of view, BRAKER It is a lightweight, high-kinetic high-explosive warhead installed on a low-cost, disposable, one-way attack drone. It is jointly managed by the U.S. Army Research and Development and Engineering Command (DEVCOM) Armament Center and the PM Close Combat Systems Office. The goal of the project is to create a highly lethal ammunition load solution that can be integrated with commercial off-the-shelf drones. Through a combination of 3D printed parts and standardized components, combined with unified power and signal interfaces, the integration between drones and ammunition is highly modular and rapid.
At the tactical application level, BRAKER is envisioned as a high-explosive warhead that can be "delivered directly to the door" by an unmanned aerial vehicle. It can carry out precision strikes along weaknesses, openings or other vulnerable parts of building or fortification structures without having to rely on traditional large carrier aircraft or expensive guided bombs. In other words, it is more like a "suicide drone flying with a bunker warhead", designed to destroy solid targets at a lower cost and with higher flexibility.
However, the US military has not disclosed details about BRAKER’s specific power level and working mechanism. The report pointed out that based on its volume and mass, it is speculated that the warhead is likely to adopt a hollow charge (shaped charge) structure similar to that of an anti-tank weapon, and achieve penetration of thick protective structures through metal jets.
“Our team at Picatinny Arsenal completed the entire process from concept to live-fire testing in just two weeks,” Col. Vincent Morris, program manager for close combat systems, said in a statement. "BRAKER has proven that we can quickly develop and safely deliver highly destructive munitions on a small unmanned aerial system platform. We are building an architecture based on the Picatinny universal lethality integration kit and small universal load interface to help the industry promote this key combat advantage at scale." The emergence of
BRAKER shows that the US military is trying to make the traditional "heavy-punch" bunker Destruction capabilities will shift to small, flexible, and mass-expendable UAV platforms, thereby finding a new balance between cost, response speed, and battlefield adaptability.