Ukraine’s New Raven FrankenSAM is Yet Another SHORAD Stopgap.

Donated by the UK, this supersonic FrankenSAM is deadly.

Image of the Raven Air Defense System, based on the HMT 600 Supacat vehicle and the Advanced Short Range Air-to-Air Missile (ASRAAM). (Image credit: Alex Hood/UK MOD)

Leave it to Ukraine to show us that duct tape and a good idea can still win the day. While the rest of the world obsesses over trillion-dollar F-47 stealth programs, Ukraine just strapped a couple of fighter jet missiles to a British truck and called it a plan.

Say hi to the Raven, an off-the-books masterpiece of battlefield bricolage. This British-supplied FrankenSAM is the latest example of Ukraine’s favorite wartime superpower: the ability to make anything deadly with just the right mix of fighting spirit, innovation, and a socket wrench.

And it’s not just improvisation, it’s a pattern. Ukrainian command has institutionalized creativity in a way that feels less like wartime adaptation and more like an open-source arms race.

Recently revealed in official Ukrainian videos, the Raven looks less like something out of Raytheon’s showroom and more like a Mad Max war rig, as if Mad Max were fighting Iranian Shaheds and Russian Orlans instead of mutant biker gangs.

The British Ministry of Defense has already delivered eight of these quirky beasts, with five more in the pipeline. And yes, they’ve been confirmed in combat use since 2023.

Since then, the system has fired over 400 missiles against aerial targets, achieving an estimated success rate of 70%. British officials say eight systems have already been transferred to Ukrainian forces, and five more are currently being prepared for delivery.

That’s right. The Raven is already out there, swatting drones and shrugging off expectations. Amazing that we’re just catching a glimpse of it now, in 2025.

From Fighter Jet to Farm Road: A Frankenstein’s Monster on a Supacat Chassis

You can almost picture the British and Ukrainian engineers staring at a warehouse full of Cold War leftovers and muttering, “Let’s have a spot of tea, then let’s get weird.”

That’s how the Raven was born: a low-profile, high-functioning, not-quite-MAD-scientist solution to a very modern problem.

At the center of the Raven’s DNA is the HMT 600 Supacat, a British-designed, all-terrain vehicle typically used for special operations, artillery towing, and hauling elite troops into places most trucks fear to tread. In its original life, the Supacat was built for Afghanistan and the roughest parts of Iraq: light, fast, and durable enough to shrug off mud, gravel, and enemy fire with equal disdain.

So, when the engineers at Task Force Kindred needed a platform that could support a 200-pound ASRAAM missile, its launch rail, and a targeting system cobbled together from drone parts and off-the-shelf optics, the Supacat’s flatbed chassis and high ground clearance became the ideal blank canvas.

Think of it as the Swiss Army knife of military mobility, now with a new blade labeled “air defense.”

But here’s where it gets deliciously unorthodox. Instead of designing a new turret or a proprietary fire-control module, they repurposed the original fighter jet missile rails, essentially taking what once launched missiles at Mach 2 from 40,000 feet and strapping it to the back of a truck more likely to be seen delivering crates of ammo than launching air-to-air intercepts.

It’s not pretty. It’s not elegant. But it absolutely gets the job done.

Add to this an improvised targeting system made from a commercial-grade gimbal, often the same type used by drone videographers, and mounted with thermal cameras and rangefinders.

The operator sits in the vehicle’s cab with a modified video game controller, guiding the camera to lock onto the heat signature of a drone or loitering munition. The moment the ASRAAM has a lock, it’s off to the races… Reliably acquiring and destroying airborne threats without ever needing a multi-million-dollar radar truck or satellite link.

This modular, low-tech-meets-high-tech combo not only makes the Raven cheap to produce and fast to deploy, it also opens the door to localized manufacturing or field repairs.

A tire change, a fresh controller, maybe a new gimbal, and this thing is back in the fight. It doesn’t need an airbase, a hardened hangar, or an extensive crew. It needs a truck, a missile, a camera, and someone with decent reflexes.

The Raven Air Defence System with the missiles in the stowed, transport position. (Image credit: Alex Hood/UK MOD)

By mounting aircraft-grade weaponry onto a ground vehicle, the Raven also skirts one of the enduring headaches of Western defense logistics: bureaucratic delay. Nobody needed to reinvent the missile or design an entirely new vehicle platform. All the components existed. The trick was in reimagining their use.

That’s the true genius of the Raven (and all of Ukraine’s FrankenSAMs, frankly), not that it does something groundbreaking, but that it does something so incredibly useful with tools everyone else forgot they had.

In the age of AI-enhanced drone swarms and hypersonic missiles, sometimes the answer to a complex problem is to dig through the warehouse, weld on the parts that still work, and create something new out of something old.

Even if it looks like it belongs in a post-apocalyptic museum.

FrankenSAM Nation: Where Nothing Matches, But Everything Works

If the Raven seems odd, it’s because it is. But Ukraine is a country that has made “weird” work. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Ukrainian military has become the master of battlefield mashups, integrating Eastern Bloc leftovers with Western missiles, often held together with little more than hope and hardwiring.

And so begins the age of the FrankenSAM.

The name itself is borrowed from the Pentagon’s own initiative. Beginning in 2023, US defense officials acknowledged that Ukraine’s sprawling collection of launchers, sensors, and missiles didn’t exactly match up. The solution was to stop waiting for compatibility. Just bolt them together, tweak the software, and let ‘er rip.

Ukraine took this idea and ran with it. The result has been a fleet of short-range air defense platforms that look like they were dreamed up by a caffeinated garage mechanic with access to a military scrapyard.

We’re talking about Soviet-era trucks firing Western infrared missiles. Western radar systems guiding old Russian interceptors. Ground-based launchers spitting out missiles originally designed for jet-on-jet combat. Sea drones firing American sidewinders. None of it was designed to work this way, and yet, under the Ukrainian flag, it does.

Ukraine’s threat environment isn’t theoretical. It is relentless, immediate, and layered.

Russian forces are launching thousands of drones, glide bombs, cruise missiles, and the occasional ballistic insult every single month. For Ukrainian forces, there’s no luxury of waiting on pristine, factory-fresh interceptors with a full warranty and NATO-standard user manuals.

That’s why the Raven matters. Like others in the FranjkenSAM program, it gives Ukraine a rugged, mobile SHORAD (short-range air defense) platform that can follow units to the front or guard soft targets in the rear. It doesn’t overly rely on centralized radar networks. It doesn’t need a battalion-sized crew. And best of all, it turns existing stockpiles of British ASRAAMs into one of the most cost-effective drone swatters on the planet.

This kind of agility is what keeps Ukraine in the fight. Every time Russia adapts by changing flight profiles or coordinating swarm attacks, Ukraine counters with something new. Sometimes that something new is a high-speed radar-homing missile. Sometimes it’s a truck with a retired fighter jet’s missile launch rails screwed onto the back.

And in this war, both are equally essential.

The Raven’s Fire and Control System, able to be used remotely and controlled by a gamepad style controller. (Image credit: Alex Hood/UK MOD)

The Strategic Limit: FrankenSAMs Fatal Flaw

FrankenSAMs are clever, scrappy, and in many cases, lethal, but they are also fundamentally tactical tools masquerading as strategic assets. And that distinction matters when you are trying to defend an entire country from one of the world’s most prolific missile-wielding adversaries.

Here’s the flaw: they do not scale… easily.

FrankenSAMs are brilliant case studies in battlefield improvisation, marrying surplus missiles with whatever launch platforms and sensors happen to be available. They’re perfect for short-range defense of fixed targets, frontline units, or tactical objectives.

But defending a nation’s energy grid or intercepting hypersonic weapons screaming in from 500 kilometers away? That is where the wheels start to wobble.

The core limitation is twofold: range and integration. These hybrid systems, by design, operate in isolation.

Most lack networked radar, encrypted comms, or data links that would allow them to plug into a broader, layered air defense architecture. That means each FrankenSAM is essentially a lone wolf. Effective in a small kill box, but sometimes blind to the rest of the airspace.

And even when paired with modest targeting equipment, like infrared gimbals or low-tier battlefield radars, they are constrained by physics. A short-range missile like the ASRAAM, R-73, or AIM-9X can only engage targets within 10 to 20 kilometers. So, while they are great for swatting down drones or helicopters, they are practically useless against ballistic threats launched from hundreds of kilometers away, or high-flying bombers orbiting outside the detection bubble.

Even more critically, they lack interception altitude. Many of these converted missiles were never meant to engage targets at 20 or 30 kilometers up. They were designed for dogfights, not space-to-ground interception arcs.

The unfortunate result is that Ukraine’s cities remain exposed to high-trajectory ballistic weapons like Russia’s Iskander or Kinzhal missiles, which rain down from stratospheric heights well outside a FrankenSAM’s envelope.

Then there’s maintenance and supply chain fragility. While these systems are often lauded for recycling surplus Western or Soviet hardware, there’s a reason these missiles were sitting in depots collecting dust.

Their seekers degrade. Their motors decay. Their cooling systems malfunction. FrankenSAMs are a bit like classic cars; you can restore them, and they might run beautifully for a while, but you’re always one broken part away from a scrapyard.

And perhaps the greatest flaw of all is their inability to project deterrence. No matter how effective a converted missile-on-a-truck may be tactically, it does not change Russian calculus.

Only systems like the Patriot or SAMP/T can credibly threaten high-value Russian air assets and alter flight patterns, with the rare exception of the Magura-7 drone boat floating SAM. That thing can go anywhere in the Black Sea and keep Russia guessing.

FrankenSAMs cannot force a Tu-95 to divert course, nor can they hold Kalibr missile carriers at bay.

They are reactive by nature, not preemptive. And in strategic warfare, being reactive is a losing hand.

In short, FrankenSAMs are gap-fillers, not game-changers. They are what you deploy when you do not have enough real SAM batteries to go around.

They save lives.

They buy time.

But they do not impose costs on the enemy the way a long-range, integrated air defense network can. They are tactical duct tape in a war that increasingly demands supercomputers and industrial-scale logistics.

Ukraine knows this. Its military has made no secret of its desire for more Patriots, more SAMP/Ts, more NASAMS, and more integration with NATO’s skyshield architecture. Until that happens, FrankenSAMs will remain the clever, necessary, but ultimately limited tools of a country forced to innovate its way through the air war, one hacked-together missile rack at a time.

The Raven isn’t a revolution in air defense. It’s something better. It shows that ingenuity still matters. That when faced with an existential threat, nations do not wait for perfect solutions. They improvise. They innovate. And they fight back with whatever they have.

Ukraine’s FrankenSAM fleet, and the Raven in particular, represents a tactical philosophy built on necessity.

It’s messy, unconventional, and occasionally ridiculous. But in war, effectiveness outranks elegance every single time.

And if the next evolution of air defense looks like a Supacat with heat-seeking missiles controlled by a teenager’s PS5 controller, so be it.

It works. And that’s all that matters.

Слава Україні! Crimea is Ukraine.