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The Drone War

From the series War industry and European defence

The Economist provides an illustration of how the use of unmanned and remotely piloted systems in warfare is expanding. In Africa, 30 governments are equipped with UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or drones. In 2024, they were deployed 484 times in local wars in thirteen different countries, twice as frequently as the previous year, causing 1,200 deaths. The most widely used drone on the continent is the TB2, produced by the Turkish company Baykar, which has seen a decade of extensive use in conflicts across Syria, Azerbaijan-Armenia, and Ukraine.

LBA Systems and MALE drones

At the Paris Air Show in mid-June, an agreement was signed to establish LBA Systems, a joint venture between Baykar and Leonardo. The aim is to produce the Akinci and TB3 drones, the latter of which will be capable of taking off from helicopter carrier decks. The aircraft will use designs based on the Turkish models, but the onboard systems will be supplied by Leonardo, with the aim of overcoming vulnerability to enemy electronic defences. Part of the assembly will be carried out at the Piaggio factories, recently acquired by Baykar. LBA Systems envisages a total global market for drones worth €100 billion over the next decade.

More than a dozen MALE (medium-altitude, long-endurance) platforms such as the Italian-Turkish ones were on display at the Paris Air Show in Le Bourget. Highly versatile, these drones are driven by propellers or turboprops and are capable of operating at 5,000-8,000 metres for many hours on ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) missions, carrying not only observation equipment but also electronic jamming devices to target enemy radars, missiles, and guided bombs. Furthermore, like the Chinese Jiutian, they can carry 100 small drones to be deployed against wide-ranging targets at opportune moments.

Everything is accumulating

Many categories of drones are available for military purposes. In addition to aerial drones, there are land drones for transporting cargo, and naval drones for mine clearance. ROVs (remotely operated vehicles), connected to their mothership via fibre optic cable, are used to detect and classify mines; while EMDVs (expendable mine disposal vehicles), equipped with explosive charges, are responsible for neutralising them. Marine drones are also expanding their capabilities to include seabed monitoring, with the task of protecting the infrastructure located there, such as telecommunications cables and energy networks. In Italy, the Fincantieri group intends to exploit the opportunity in this market segment, with a revenue target of €800 million in two years.

Aerial drones are typically designed in multifarious sizes and capabilities, starting with derivatives of small commercial models. These are slightly larger than a sketchbook and can be used as hundreds of thousands of small remote-controlled bombs (we will come back to this). Added to these are the aforementioned MALE (with a central body the size of a small car) and suicide systems, as well as the so-called loyal wingman drones, or CCA (collaborative combat aircraft), designed to accompany next-generation fighter jets.

“The proliferation of these unmanned systems has certainly changed the face of war”, writes Anne Bauer in Les Echos [July 8th], yet “for States, there is a real drama in the ongoing rearmament: the codes of air-land combat are being overturned, but everything is accumulating and nothing is being taken away”. When it comes to striking deep inside Iranian nuclear installations, “the hundreds of categories of drones cannot, or cannot yet, replace the use of bombers, fighters, and their support systems: refuellers, satellites, radars, bombs, and navigators”. Certainly, the “drama” of everything accumulating concerns the coffers of States, not the prospects of the arms industry.

"MALE" DRONES ON DISPLAY AT THE PARIS AIR SHOW
Model Manufacturer State Wingspan (m) Flight hours
Aarok Turgis et Gaillard France 22 24
Aksungur Turkish Aerospace Industries Turkey 24 40
Akinci LBA Systems Italy-Turkey 7 24
TB3 LBA Systems Italy-Turkey 14 21
Eurodrone Airbus Trans-EU 30 40
MQ-9 SkyGuardian General Atomics US 24 40
Sirtap Airbus Trans-EU 12 20
Flexrotor Airbus Trans-EU 3 30
R2-600 Fly-R France 6 25

Some platforms were only present with display models.

Source: Paris Air Show, Le Figaro

Rheinmetall and Anduril

The Paris Air Show at Le Bourget also saw the announcement of a collaboration between Germany’s Rheinmetall and Anduril, an emerging group in the American arms sector. The two companies will jointly produce Barracuda precision ammunition and rocket engines, but the main objective is to develop a European variant of the Fury, one of the two prototypes chosen by the USAF as wingmen for the new-generation F-47 fighter [see Lotta Comunista, February 20-25].

Both the Fury (code name YFQ-44) and the other prototype (YFQ-42) produced by General Atomics were on display at Le Bourget, as was the new platform designed by Dassault, derived from studies conducted at the time on the Neuron in collaboration with Leonardo, Saab, Ruag, and Airbus Spain. Anduril and General Atomics are working to obtain a licence from the US government to export their products, according to Aviation Week.

In this case, we are talking about very advanced types of drones, suitable for wars between equal powers, in which airspace is contested by both anti-aircraft systems and enemy aircraft. These UCAS (uncrewed combat aerial systems) benefit from high speeds, good payload capacity, stealth characteristics, and autonomy linked to intelligent software. They are expensive, but less so than a fighter jet, which they can replace or complement. China also unveiled its Feihong FH-97A, a wingman for the J-20 fighter jet, last December.

“Integrating Anduril’s solutions into Rheinmetall’s production means manufacturing in Europe for Europe”, the German group said in a press release. French analyst Jean-Dominique Merchet, on the other hand, spoke of “astonishment” and “a strategic choice that affects European industry” [L’Opinion, June 27th].

Lessons from Ukraine

The conflict in Ukraine is a huge and tragic testing ground. At the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian army skilfully leveraged the approximately 30 TB2 Bayraktar drones at its disposal. They were used as reconnaissance and data transmission systems, and to communicate the positions of Russian armoured columns – a task usually performed by light aircraft, which Kyiv did not have at its disposal. In addition to drones, Russian armoured vehicles were targeted by patrols of soldiers armed with anti-tank missiles and artillery. This tactic worked until the Russian army adopted countermeasures, particularly in the field of electronic warfare.

After Ukraine’s conquest of Kherson in autumn 2022, the front line has remained largely unchanged; a war of attrition has begun, which the Ukrainians are fighting without air control and with a tendency to run out of artillery ammunition, allowing the Russian air force to strike from a great distance. All this has contributed to the growth of the role of drones, with two notable trends: the use of FPV (first person view) drones and suicide drones, for attacks on both infrastructure and civilian neighbourhoods.

FPV drones are piloted as if the pilot were on board via radio-controlled image feedback – hence the term first person view. They have an operating range of 10-30 km and are capable of carrying small explosive charges through the doors and windows of armoured vehicles. Initially, Ukrainian drones were either originals or copies of commercial Mavic drones from the Chinese company DJI. Today, millions are produced domestically.

FPVs, now widely used also by the Russian army, are constantly evolving because the frequencies that guide them and transmit images to the pilot are easily disrupted. This has led to a battle to constantly change frequencies, and the recent adoption of FPVs connected to the pilot, like kites, with a fibre optic cable, which subverts enemy countermeasures.

Russia makes extensive use of Shahed drones. Initially imported from Iran, modified versions are now being produced in Russia at a rate of thousands per month, and are known as “Geran” in Russian. These suicide drones cost $35,000 each, have a range of 2,000 km and a payload of 40 kg of explosives, and can be launched from mobile platforms. It is uneconomical to counter them with anti-missile systems, as the cost of an interceptor missile varies from one to two million dollars.

A document from the American think tank CSIS writes that “the Shahed maintains a cruel attritional logic”, and indeed “it is the most cost-effective munition in Russia’s firepower strike arsenal”. Even if they only achieve their objectives 10% of the time, “their low cost means Russia can fire mass salvos almost daily, wearing down Ukrainian air defences and terrorising the population”.

Killer robots “with our values”

Unlike Ukraine, Israel has considerable air power as reflected in its absolute dominance of the skies in the twelve-day war against Iran. It therefore successfully handled the attacks by Iranian Shahed drones, which had to fly long distances at low speed before eventually engaging Tel Aviv’s defences. The use of Israeli drones in attacks on Tehran’s anti-missile systems – from what little is known – is believed to have had impressive results. More so than technology, this is due to the surprise element of the attack, meticulously prepared well in advance.

There is much debate about the use of artificial intelligence in increasingly complex war scenarios. There is discussion about the moral appropriateness of designing systems capable of acting autonomously, even if communication with the military base that is supposed to manage them is interrupted. Estimates are being made of how high the risk of error is for these technologies.

Helsing is a German company specialising in the development of AI systems for drones: its Centaur AI software is already being tested and is said to incorporate the experience of the most experienced fighter pilots 200 times over. Antoine Bordes, vice president of Helsing, told the Financial Times [July 11th]: “[It is] important for Europe not to be squeamish about developing autonomous strike technologies. If we don’t do it in Europe, with our own values, it will be done elsewhere”.

Lotta Comunista, July-August 2025

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