00:00All right, for our Weapon of the Week this week, folks, we're talking about a tech refresh
00:03on a system that is out there in the thousands. Here to talk a little bit more about that
00:08is John McGee with Kongsburg. John, thanks so much for joining us again.
00:11Hey, for sure. Thank you.
00:12So we have the CROWS system here, right?
00:14Yeah, for sure.
00:15There are tens of thousands of these out of the system.
00:17There are tens of thousands of these systems across.
00:19What does CROWS stand for, John?
00:21Common Remote Operated Weapon Station.
00:23And this is going through a technology refresh right now?
00:26So yeah, so CROWS has been in the U.S. military for over 20 years.
00:31We've produced 17,000 of them. There's 20,000 worldwide.
00:35A couple of years ago, we started working with the government to identify the parts that were
00:39obsolescent, and it gave us an opportunity to start to bring in digitization and replace
00:46those analog components. So really what this is, we've taken a legacy system, replaced the
00:52sensors, taking the analog kind of processors out, giving us the ability to be networked.
00:58Kind of walk me through, and I'm sure there's going to be some secret sauce stuff that you
01:01can't really say, but kind of walk me through some of the improvements on here that you can
01:05point out.
01:05For sure. So the sensors have changed, the thermals have changed, the processors have
01:11changed underneath. There's a lot of things you can't see. A lot of it's in the software
01:14and the ability of the processors that are replacing with those analog systems to be digitized
01:20and give it the ability that, unfortunately, I can't point to those components because they're
01:25Sure. They're internal.
01:26They're internal.
01:26When you talk about the ability to network these CROWS now, what does that bring the warfighter?
01:32Yeah, for sure. So by networking the systems together, and I talked a little bit before about
01:38Ukraine, one of the things we've learned is that you can take these legacy systems, existing
01:44systems that the Army already has, and add additional capability to it. You can take a
01:49system, you can add a radar to it, you can add some processing power, digital processing
01:54power. You start to put those systems together via communications backbone. We don't do that,
01:59but we're agnostic to it. We're agnostic to the radars. You start to give a counter-UAS
02:05capability and the ability to hand off targets between one another.
02:08Absolutely. And that ability to hand off targets seems like that's becoming
02:13pretty vital.
02:14It's very important. Yeah. Our patented collaborative fire control system is really what enables
02:19us to take these systems, and not just our systems. We can take other people's systems,
02:24other people's effectors, and tie them together to enable us to really give the warfighter the
02:31best lethality-sharing platform across the battle space.
02:36How's the tech refresh going right now? I mean, are we halfway through?
02:41We are actively in production. Our plants in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, it's been there
02:45for 20 years. Like I said, there's 17,000 out there. Some systems are new. We are building
02:51brand new tech refreshes. Some systems are conversions. We take a legacy system and convert
02:55it to a new system. All right. John, really appreciate your time today.
02:59Thank you. Thank you.
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