US Air Force to deploy Angry Kitten in Reaper drone

The US Air Force is turning to an unlikely place to beef up its electronic warfare countermeasures: a decade-old aircraft-mounted pod known as the "Angry Kitten."

While not a new device for the USAF, the latest tests involved the first flight of the Angry Kitten Electronic Warfare Pod on an unmanned craft, in this case a General Atomics MQ-9A Reaper drone.

Angry Kitten, developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), is more aptly described as a full-fledged cat at this point, with work on the pod going way back to 2013. As originally developed, the Angry Kitten is designed to be "fully adaptive and autonomous [with] capabilities that aren't currently available in [radar] jammers," GTRI research engineer Stan Sutphin mentioned a decade ago.