Trophy

Trophy is a hard-kill active protection system for armoured vehicles, developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems with the radar supplied by Israel Aerospace Industries’ Elta division. It entered operational service in 2011 on the Israel Defense Forces’ Merkava IV main battle tank, designed to detect, classify and intercept incoming anti-tank rockets and guided missiles before they strike the hull. The system addresses a problem that has shaped armour design since the proliferation of RPG-7 launchers and Kornet-class missiles: even the heaviest passive armour can be defeated by a cheap, well-aimed shaped charge, and crews need a layer that engages the threat in flight.

The system is built around Elta’s ELM-2133 WindGuard radar, four flat-panel AESA antennas mounted around the turret to give continuous 360-degree hemispheric coverage. When the radar detects a closing projectile, the fire-control computer classifies it, computes the intercept point and cues a rotating launcher that fires a directed charge of multiple explosively formed penetrators. The intercept happens within metres of the vehicle and within milliseconds of detection, with the launcher slewing fast enough to engage threats arriving from almost any angle. Trophy also passes the threat’s point of origin to the crew, allowing immediate counter-fire. Magazine capacity allows successive engagements without reload between salvos.

Israel was the first and most experienced operator. Trophy’s first publicly recorded combat intercept came in March 2011, when a Merkava IV defeated an RPG fired from Gaza, and the system was used extensively during Operation Protective Edge in 2014 and in subsequent Gaza operations. The United States Army adopted Trophy HV for the M1A2 Abrams beginning in 2018, fielding it to brigade combat teams forward-deployed in Europe, and the US Marine Corps followed for its own Abrams fleet. Germany contracted Rafael to equip a fleet of Leopard 2A7 tanks, in a deal worth several hundred million euros, and the United Kingdom selected the system for its Challenger 3 upgrade. Smaller export orders cover armour fleets elsewhere in NATO.

Rafael has since spun the architecture into a family. Trophy MV targets medium vehicles such as the Stryker, and Trophy LV scales the same logic down to lighter platforms including the JLTV. A Vehicle Protection System variant integrates the radar and effectors into more compact mounts for armoured personnel carriers and engineering vehicles. Continuing development has focused on widening the threat envelope toward top-attack munitions and loitering drones, the categories that Ukraine’s battlefield has pushed to the front of every armour programme.

Trophy competes most directly with Elbit’s Iron Fist and Rheinmetall’s AMAP-ADS, but it is the only Western hard-kill APS with more than a decade of confirmed combat use, which has driven much of its export traction.