France takes aim at unmanned systems, taking lessons from Paris Olympics

PARIS — “Attacks using swarms of armed, unmanned air systems is no longer just science fiction.”

That was the warning from Emmanuel Chiva, director of France’s defense procurement agency, at one of the nation’s largest defense expositions, Euronaval, hosted in Paris in October.

Since Chiva’s remarks Ukraine says it has suffered a wave of drone attacks from Russia, and Israel is bracing for a potential third barrage of drones and missiles fired by Iran. Meanwhile sea-based unmanned surface vessels (USVs) have struck both commercial and naval ships in the Red Sea, and Kyiv has managed to strike significant blows against Russia’s Black Sea fleet using the same kind of nascent technology.

As such, defense against unmanned aerial and maritime systems was a key focus of this year’s Euronaval, where officials discussed what Paris was doing about the threat and industry players offered up their defensive systems as potential solutions.

“So, we need to stay in the race and find an answer to these threats, and use the lessons learned in the Red and Black seas,” Chiva’s deputy, General Thierry Carlier, said during the show.

RELATED: Nets, jamming and ‘cyber scalpels’: Pentagon weighs homeland counter-drone tech in mountain exercises

In France’s 2024-30 Military Program Law, €5 billion ($5.3 billion) has been earmarked for ground-to-air defense, which includes counter-UAS equipment.

In 2024, because of the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, the anti-drone mission just during the competition weeks was expected to “amount to 20,000 hours of surveillance, 10 times more than for the 2023 Rugby World Cup,” General Stéphane Mille, commander of the Air and Space Force, said in an interview prior to the event. According to a National Assembly report, 355 unauthorized drones were detected during the Games — largely flown by amateurs unaware of legislation — and 81 arrests were made.

As the threat has grown, so has the investment of firms worldwide, including in France, to counter them. That requires the complex process of spotting the threat, classifying it and then passing that information along — in near-real time — to other systems that can do something about it.

Erik Van Kimmenaede, Thales marketing director for surface radar, told journalists during a pre-Euronaval briefing that “all this needs to be automated to act fast.”

There’s also the question of cost-per-kill. There’s little point in using a million-dollar missile to take out a drone that cost just a few hundred dollars. Thales has developed the E-Trap to neutralize these Class 1 (micro, mini or small) drones, which had its first public outing at the Euronaval show although it was discreetly deployed during the Olympic Games, according to the company.

Developed with the support of France’s procurement arm, DGA, Thales says E-Trap is a 360° high-power microwave antenna that emits a very brief but very powerful electromagnetic pulse meant to destroy the electronic components necessary to make a drone function. It is effective against a single UAV/USV or a swarm of them, the company says.

Elsewhere, Safran Electronics & Defense has teamed with the French company Hologarde to develop its Skyjacker counter-drone solution. That one was also used to protect the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The system, which the companies say is effective at ranges up to six miles spoofs the drone, altering its trajectory by replacing the satellite navigation signals it uses to guide it towards its target with different ones. According to Thales, “Skyjacker can efficiently defeat isolated drones and drone swarms in land and naval environments.”

Chiva told a National Assembly defense committee on Oct. 23 that “at least three” of France’s FREMM frigates will be equipped with the Skyjacker system. He also mentioned that “at sea (…) we can project a great quantity of metal into the air to neutralize these threats, notably when confronted by swarms. An anti-drone task force was set up in the light of events in the Red Sea. It studied, for example, the use of the 76mm munitions from the (Oto-Melara) 76mm gun to neutralize drone threats.”

At Euronaval, MC2 technologies, a smaller business that specializes in micro and nanotechnologies, was also showing some of its counter-UAS systems, including the Nerod, a jammer gun designed to disrupt and neutralize communications between micro and/or mini—drones and their controllers.

The company says 80 of these guns have already been delivered to French armed forces and police, and some 500 others have gone “numerous clients abroad in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East,” including Luxembourg, Côte d’Ivoire and Japan. The Air and Space Force said one of their snipers used the Nerod from a Fennec helicopter in June during the 80th D-Day celebrations in Normandy to take out a drone that was flying too close to the official convoy, which included French President Emmanuel Macron.

MC2 Technolgoies has also delivered its Neptune and Majes counter-drone systems (which work by jamming) to the French Navy which put them to good effect last week to neutralize a UAV, according to the company’s LinkedIn page.