LARNACA (CYPRUS). The 21st SPIKE Users Club Meeting convened last month in Larnaca (Cyprus), bringing together more than 200 participants from 23 nations.
The meeting was hosted by the Cyprus National Guard.
Four new customers have joined the SPIKE family since the previous meeting, extending its global user base to some 48 countries worldwide.
Founded by SPIKE user nations in 2003, the Users Club is the annual forum where customers and operators exchange operational experience, lessons learned, maintenance and training practice.
EuroSpike, a European joint venture of Diehl Defence, Rheinmetall Electronics and Rafael, manages sales, marketing and program management for SPIKE customers across Europe,
participated in the Users’ club opened with Nations Day, a professional forum in which delegations presented their national perspectives, shared operational experience with SPIKE systems and discussed common challenges.
Industry Day focused on current capabilities, future developments and opportunities for industrial cooperation.
The central product milestone of Industry Day was Rafael’s presentation of the L-SPIKE system to the global SPIKE user community
. The presentation showcased Rafael’s family of loitering weapon systems, expanding the SPIKE systems legacy portfolio with complementary products for the evolving battlefield.
L-SPIKE builds on the proven SPIKE legacy and an operational foundation already familiar to SPIKE users.
This common foundation enables existing users to add loitering capabilities alongside their precision-guided missile capabilities, while using the entire existing launchers from the legacy SPIKE systems and benefiting from Rafael’s established approach to training, support, operational knowledge-sharing and continuous SPIKE system development.
Over three days, 9 national SPIKE teams competed in an international tournament testing SPIKE LR2 knowledge and operating skills.
The winning teams closed the competition with live fire of SPIKE SR missiles.
“The SPIKE family continues to evolve together with its users. Presenting L-SPIKE to the global SPIKE community as a natural next step, combining decades of operational expertise and shared user knowledge with new and advanced missile systems loitering capabilities designed to address evolving battlefield challenges” said Ran Kaplan, vice president, Head of Precision Tactical Weapon Systems Directorate at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.
The SPIKE Users Club provides a valuable framework for exchanging operational, technical and training experience among user nations.
It helps us to learn from other armed forces, apply useful lessons to our own tactical requirements and create a direct feedback mechanism through which operational experience contributes to improvements in training, logistics and future capability development,” said Lieutenant General Neophytos Pachoulides, Deputy Chief of the Cyprus National Guard.
“SPIKE currently has 13 production lines worldwide, reflecting our long-term commitment to the SPIKE user community and to local industrial cooperation. Rafael and EuroSpike are investing in SPIKE production lines to further expand manufacturing capacity, strengthen supply-chain resilience and respond more rapidly to evolving market dynamics” said Ran Kaplan, vice president, head of Precision Tactical Weapon Systems Directorate at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.
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