A ground-based IRIS-T battery can reach about eight miles in its short-range form, or roughly 25 miles in the medium-range version. Useful numbers, until the thing you need to shoot down is 200 miles away and heading for a city.

So Diehl Defence and a German start-up better known for working on spaceplanes built a taxi for the missile. On 22 August, Polaris Raumflugzeuge announced that the Cobra 600 prototype had made its first flight — a 20-kilometre hop the company described as perfectly smooth.

The idea is almost rudely simple: bolt a proven air-to-air missile onto a cheap jet drone, fly it out to where the trouble is, and let a radar 250 miles behind it pull the trigger.

A Missile Taxi, Not a Fighter

Call the Cobra 600 a combat drone and you will misunderstand it. It carries no radar and no targeting sensor of its own. The only eye on board belongs to the IRIS-T itself, the imaging infrared seeker in the missile’s nose.

Everything else comes from the ground. The drone is tethered by datalink to an IRIS-T SLM or SLS battery, which finds the target, identifies it, vectors the drone into position and commands the shot. Cut the datalink and the Cobra 600 is an expensive model aircraft with a missile strapped to it.

That dependence is the design, not a flaw. Germany already owns the radars, the command vehicles and the missiles. What it lacked was a way to put a shooter 200 miles forward without risking a crewed aircraft.

Built by a Company That Wants to Reach Orbit

The airframe comes from Polaris Raumflugzeuge, a firm whose long-term ambition is a reusable spaceplane. Its house style shows: an efficient delta planform with a flying-wing flavour and endplate fins on the wingtips.

The prototype shown in Berlin flew on two JetCat P1000-PRO micro turbojets, the sort of engine that would not look out of place on a very serious model jet, each producing a little under 250 pounds of thrust. The airframe also has intake ports for two more. Polaris concept artwork shows a four-engine version with the turbojets buried deep and fed by long ducts, which would cut the infrared and radar signature considerably.

Unlike a one-way attack drone, this one has retractable tricycle landing gear. It takes off and lands from a runway, or from a stretch of highway, and can be flown again. It is also meant to be cheap enough that a commander will accept losing it.

Russia Got There First, Badly

The concept is not unprecedented. Russia has been bolting R-60 air-to-air missiles and even shoulder-launched MANPADS onto its Shahed and Geran drones, largely to threaten the Ukrainian helicopters and light aircraft sent up to intercept them.

It works more as a deterrent than a weapon. A propeller-driven Shahed has poor situational awareness and almost no agility, and the R-60 is a far older and cruder missile than the IRIS-T. The Cobra 600 is larger, jet-powered, potentially four-engined, and carries a modern seeker. The performance gap is not close.

There is also precedent from the other direction. In 2002 a USAF MQ-1 Predator fired a Stinger at an Iraqi MiG-25 that was trying to shoot it down. The Predator lost that exchange. Drones have been trying to shoot back for a long time.

What It Actually Fixes

Nobody should mistake 250 miles of drone range for 250 miles of missile performance. A long-range surface-to-air missile covers that distance in minutes; the Cobra 600 has to fly there. Unless it is already loitering on station or pre-positioned along a known threat axis, its reaction time is limited, and the IRIS-T cannot engage the ballistic targets that a genuine long-range system can.

What it does offer is presence. It can orbit a sector for hours, waiting. It can sit on a runway as a quick-reaction interceptor. And it costs a fraction of a long-range interceptor round, which matters when Europe has spent three decades letting its ground-based air defence wither and is now trying to rebuild it against cheap drones arriving in quantity.

Development is still mostly funded by the companies themselves, with investment from at least one interested nation that has not been named. One 20-kilometre flight does not make a weapons system. But it is a working aircraft carrying a real missile, and that is further than most air-defence concepts get.

Diehl Defence on the IRIS-T family — the missile at the centre of the Cobra 600 concept.

Sources: TWZ, Polaris Raumflugzeuge, Diehl Defence, Defence Blog, Army Recognition, Defense Express.