After years of reticence about the use of small, cheap suicide drones in combat, the Ukraine conflict has convinced the French military it’s a capability troops cannot do without in a future conflict.
Earlier this month the French Ministry of the Armed Forces announced it had narrowed down a competition for the production of such UAVs from 19 competitors down to two in its Colibri (Hummingbird) project. Colibri was launched last May by the nation’s Defense Innovation Agency (AID) in partnership with the French DGA procurement agency.
France hopes to have a “base of 1,800” of the remotely-controlled munitions, Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu told Le Figaro last month. In late January, he told French lawmakers that France had “fallen behind” in developing the new type of weapon that is clearly here to stay. He said the plan was to have “thousands” of these types of munitions by 2030. “That’s part of the lessons learned from Ukraine,” he explained.
The two teams moving on in the Colibri competition are MBDA/Novadem’s proposal based on a rotor-blade drone bigger than the NX70 that Novadem has already delivered to the French Army, and Nexter with a drone-manufacturer, whose name was not released at its request, with a fixed-wing drone solution.
MBDA/NOVADEM Sphynx
The idea is that both consortia will fly demonstrators before the end of this year so that the AID and the DGA can “evaluate the pertinence of these industry proposals vis-à-vis the operational requirement,” according to a statement issued by the AID.
The MBDA/Novadem proposal, called Sphinx, would be most useful in urban or more enclosed spaces while the Nexter project based on a surveillance drone is better suited for use in more open environments, the AID said. Nexter’s munitions unit, Nexter Arrowtech, will develop the munition that will be carried by a drone made by the anonymous drone-manufacturer. Nexter Arrowtech proposed a “product that is absent today from the French arsenal. This innovative operational concept will carry a new, controlled fragmentation warhead,” Nexter said in a statement.
Source: Breaking Defense