IAV 2025: Moog and Supacat present RIwP and HMT combo for UK’s GBAD requirement

Moog and Supacat have teamed up to combine the Reconfigurable Integrated-weapons Platform (RIwP) onto Supacat’s High Mobility Transporter (HMT) fitted with an armoured cab at the 2025 Defence IQ International Armoured Vehicles Conference, held from the 21st – 23rd January in Farnborough, the UK.

The vehicle is being offered for the British Army’s Ground Based Air Defence (GBAD) programme, which includes two requirements; one for short-range air defence and another for counter-UAS. “The Army wants two separate vehicles, but we feel that layered capabilities on a single platform offer much more choice for the user. It means that whatever is in the air, be that UAS or helicopters, the vehicle and crew will have something that can engage it,” Richard Allen-Miles, Moog’s EMEA Capture Lead told Calibre in an interview. 

“The HMT variant presented is based on the Jackal 3 extended chassis with an integrated armoured cab,” Phil Applegarth, director and head of Supacat told Calibre in an interview. The RIwP is a real working turret that has been brought over from the US. “It arrived in the UK in November 2024 and had achieved 90% of its functionality and integration by Christmas,” Allen-Miles added. 

“The HMT is modular by design, and as long as there was space for the turret, all of the power was there for it to be plumbed in,” Applegarth said. The RIwP is mounted on a flatbed at the rear of the chassis and armed with the Thales High Velocity Missile – Starstreak – as well as the M230 LF 30 mm x 113 mm Bushmaster cannon from Northrop Grumman. It could also be fitted with the Lightweight Multi-role Missile (LMM) if required. A 7.62 mm machine gun completes the turret’s lethality package, with an L3 MX series electro-optical/infrared sight fitted, which is standard to the US Stryker vehicles carrying the RIwP. However, any sight or sensor package could be fitted to the turret, Allen-Miles explained. 

The Supacat is a well-proven platform for the British Army, with close to 1,000 chassis in service and 96% of the supply chain sitting in the UK. It may be an important offering for the British Army, which is aiming to reduce the number of vehicle chassis types that it has in service to 15 by 2030, Applegarth explained. Using the already in-service Jackal chassis to carry new capabilities could represent a relatively low risk approach for the Army in that case. 

Nevertheless, a demonstration RIwP also armed with HVM/LMM canisters, has also been displayed on a Dingo 3 during this year’s IAV. Dingo 3 is being entered into the Land Mobility Programme by KNDS. 

The next steps for the British Army’s GBAD programme are not clear, however, it is likely to survive the pending Strategic Defence Review as an absolutely critical capability gap has been opened by the UK donating many of its Stormer SHORAD vehicles to Ukraine. “The hope is that the Army will mandate a live firing trial of the competitor systems to see how they perform,” Allen-Miles said. The GBAD programme also includes requirements for improvements to the country’s command and control capabilities, as well as its mid-range air defence systems. 

Tech profile: HMT and RIwP

The Dingo 3 will also be presented with a demonstration Moog RIwP fitted, it will be shown as if armed with eight StarStreak or LLM missiles. Credit: Moog.

The RIwP (pronounced ‘rip’) is designed to be reconfigurable, which means that if selected by the British Army and the threat changed, new missiles, effectors, and sights could be integrated onto the turret with relative ease and without requiring a new turret procurement process. This has in fact been demonstrated by the US Army, which initially procured the RIwP armed with Stinger and Hellfire missiles for what was known as the IM-SHORAD program, now called Sgt Stout. In some cases the Hellfire missiles have now been removed and replaced with a new pod of four additional Stinger missiles.  The RIwP also includes Moogs stabilisation technology, which helps to protect expensive missiles from the damage caused by vibration and shocks incurred by the vehicle driving on rough terrain.

The StarStreak missiles have proven effective in Ukraine, they are optically guided and use laser beam riding guidance and reach speeds in excess of Mach 3 – more than 1,000 metres per second with a range of 7 km. The missile is armed with three darts forming a tungsten warhead that is designed to defeat fast moving and armoured targets like attack helicopters that might unmask late to minimise the response time. The darts – or hitiles as Thales refers to them – are designed to penetrate the target causing kinetic damage, before a small warhead is detonated, further expanding the chances of a successful interception. The Northrop Grumman M230 LF 30 mm cannon also provides a valuable addition for counter-UAS operations, however, this would be somewhat contingent on the procurement of the XM1211 proximity fuzed round, which has demonstrated a high probability of kill against UAS type targets. Regular 30 mm ammunition will struggle to hit small manoeuvring targets that are common in Ukraine and Syria. 

The HMT 6×6 from Supacat combines the Jackal 3 extended chassis with a closed armoured cab that can accommodate four personnel and provide them with blast and ballistic protection. It has a payload capacity of 4,000 kg with a base weight including crew and armour of 8,000 kg for a gross vehicle weight up to 12,000 kg. The chassis is 7.1 m long with a single axle at the front in the middle of the cab, with a dual-axle group at the rear of the chassis, which helps to distribute the added weight that might be installed on the flatbed. It has a cruising range of 800 km and can reach top speeds of 120 km/h. 

Calibre comment

The British Army, and NATO forces as a whole, are likely to integrate some form of SHORAD into their land forces over the coming decade. This is because drone-led ISR is now central to the Russian way of war, replacing forward observers and radars in much of the initial detection element of a targeting cycle. In some cases, such as the Zala-416 or Orlan-30 can be the lead element of the Russian reconnaissance-fires contour, which pairs reconnaissance assets with precision strike systems like the Lancet loitering munition in real time. This means that detection by a drone may be followed by a precise strike within 15 minutes. This makes winning the ISR battle a critical component of modern warfare, one that land forces ignore at their peril.