The potential clients for technology such as electronic jammers and interceptor drones tested at the Brétigny-sur-Orge site are no longer just governments, police and armies.

Private firms and state entities across Europe that operate critical infrastructure want to strengthen their defenses, with some utilities asking for authorization to shoot drones down themselves. From Paris to Berlin, governments are taking note.

They are worried that hybrid warfare or a drone attack could knock out power to millions of people — as has happened frequently in Ukraine after Russian strikes.

“It is a theoretical, and increasingly a practical, possibility that there could be heating outages this winter due to hybrid attacks,” Kristian Ruby, secretary general of European energy body Eurelectric, told Reuters.

Some European governments are responding by starting to give firms powers traditionally confined to the military. Interviews by Reuters with over 30 company executives, officials and drone experts meanwhile show the technology to detect and bring down drones is maturing faster than the rules on who may use it.

Approaches vary widely across Europe and legal uncertainties remain, including over who has the right to order a response to a drone threat. Bringing down a drone could cause injury or death to people on the ground or damage property, raising questions for companies about liability and accountability.

“Defenseless”

France is among countries that have led the way. Its parliament passed a law in August allowing approved operators of critical infrastructure and contractors to detect, jam and shoot down drones near designated facilities.

The law passed by the French parliament in August responded to a wave of drone incursions over critical and military sites, including flights over the Ile Longue nuclear submarine base near Brest in northwestern France in December 2025.

France wants a newly expanded list of sensitive sites deemed of vital importance equipped by 2027, a senior French official involved in the plans told Reuters, asking not to be named because details of the plan are not yet public.

“We were defenseless in the face of the (drone) threat,” the official said, adding that concerns had been growing over the last decade as unmanned aerial vehicles became more accessible and more common.

The French government wants to give operators of critical infrastructure such as state-owned utility company EDF and state-owned railway company SNCF a catalogue of approved systems ranging from electronic jammers to interceptor drones, depending on different environments and situations.

Confirming important elements of the plan outlined by the French official, Systematic Paris-Region, which runs the government testing program at Brétigny-sur-Orge, said evaluations launched this summer had so far catalogued three systems integrators — which combine different computer systems into a unified whole — and 17 counter-drone systems.

It said assessments were continuing and work was underway to accelerate procurement from among those solutions.

France’s defense ministry said the law passed in August would help strengthen capabilities to counter the threat, though it said it could speak only for the critical infrastructure under its authority. EDF and SNCF declined comment.

Who can bring down a drone?

The discovery of an explosives-laden drone near a Ukrainian cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig/Halle airport in August underlined how far the risks have spread.

Germany blamed Russia for the incident. Moscow denied it was behind it, and has repeatedly denied carrying out hybrid attacks in Europe, many of which have been in countries that support Kyiv in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But concerns are growing that national authorities cannot respond fast enough to protect widely dispersed infrastructure against such attacks, and that the damage caused by relatively cheap drones could bring hefty repair costs.

In Germany, where counter-drone operations remain a policing function, the interior ministry told Reuters it was reviewing how critical infrastructure operators and third parties could be legally involved in active counter-drone measures.

In September, Austria announced plans to give similar powers to critical infrastructure operators, including large energy firms. Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner told a press conference that the state could not protect every site on its own.

Poland has gone further. Operators told Reuters they have deployed counter-drone systems and trained with military and police units. Drone-restricted zones have been established around critical energy infrastructure, and designated security units working for operators have been authorized to destroy, disable or take control of drones entering them.

But two sources at energy transmission companies on NATO’s eastern flank told Reuters that effective intervention still requires more assurances, and perhaps a judicial precedent, on who bears responsibility for collateral damage.

Without that certainty, they said, operators of critical infrastructure could remain reluctant to neutralize drones because bringing one down could itself cause injury or costly damage.

Built for recovery

Having powers to bring down drones would be a change of approach for companies across Europe.

Executives, officials and energy analysts told Reuters that utilities have spent years hardening networks and preparing to restore disrupted services, rather than preventing attacks.

Leonhard Birnbaum, chief executive of German energy firm E.ON, said in September that operators must assume some attacks will succeed, rather than plan on stopping all of them. The company operates about 2,720 substations across Germany, he said.

Lithuania is building a fortified substation near its border with Russia as part of plans by the Baltic states and Poland to improve their defenses that include constructing bunkers, installing anti-drone nets and building up stocks of hard-to-replace equipment for critical parts of the energy grid.

Poland’s state-owned transmission operator PSE patrols parts of its about 16,500-km (10,250-mile) high-voltage network by helicopter and is preparing more powerful aircraft to help protect an undersea power link to Sweden.

Yet relatively inexpensive drones are challenging such defenses. Essential equipment such as large transformers can take years to replace, while even a successful repair can leave infrastructure out of service for months.

Not all utility operators are seeking a bigger role in defending themselves.

Asta Sihvonen-Punkka, chief executive of Finland’s national power grid operator Fingrid, told Reuters that responsibility for countering threats around critical infrastructure should remain with Finnish authorities and armed forces.

Any move to give such powers to utility operators would be “a very, very big change” requiring careful legal consideration, she said.

Jari Stenius, head of security of Finnish utility Fortum, said he was content for energy companies to focus on producing energy while police and military authorities handled security threats.

Technology ready, rules are not

Security officials and counter-drone technology firms say systems are becoming increasingly automated because operators cannot station specialist teams at every site.

Modern counter-drone systems combine sensors, command-and-control software and countermeasures into a single chain designed to identify, classify and respond to threats within seconds.

Several companies told Reuters that uncertainty over who can authorize a response has slowed investment in the latter stages of that process. France is therefore trying to automate the process as much as possible, said the senior French official involved in France’s plans.

The official said security workers at utilities should eventually be able to detect a threat and launch an automated response at the press of a button, because having operators trained to use military-grade solutions at every location was unrealistic.

German defense company Rheinmetall told Reuters the biggest hurdle for civilian operators was often the delay between detecting a drone and deciding whether to deploy a countermeasure, as legal responsibilities remain fragmented.

Rheinmetall said interest from private infrastructure operators in counter-drone systems was rising sharply.

The company said it was conducting workshops, site surveys and infrastructure assessments for operators and was preparing for what it described as a “very fast-growing” market segment.

(Reporting by Maria Rugamer and Leo Marchandon in Gdansk, Florence Loeve in Paris and Marek Strzelecki in Warsaw.)

Speaking Oct. 1 at the Bergen military training area during the army’s “Experimentalserie Land” trials, Pistorius said ground forces will begin forming the regiment in 2027. Officials credited direct operational exchanges with Ukrainian frontline units for shaping the live-fire trials, which tested both aerial drones and unmanned ground systems. Pistorius emphasized that ground robotics will serve as an equal operational pillar alongside aerial systems, with the regiment consolidating reconnaissance, deep-strike capabilities, unmanned ground vehicles, electronic warfare, and counter-drone defenses under a unified command.

The regiment will serve as a divisional asset assigned to the 10th Panzer Division − the formation earmarked as Germany’s high-readiness “Division 2025” pledge to NATO, which also oversees Panzerbrigade 45 in Lithuania.

German Army Chief Lt. Gen. Christian Freuding said the Bundeswehr is pursuing a dual-track strategy that envisions setting aside dedication formations while also institutionalizing drone usage throughout the entire force.. At the turn of the year, the service will simultaneously begin fielding tactical unmanned systems directly across three core combat branches: light infantry, reconnaissance, and armor units.

The army plans to recruit between 300 and 350 personnel for the regiment’s initial footprint in 2027 before expanding the unit to an end strength of up to 600 troops, according to Freuding. In remarks to German wire service dpa, Freuding said planners target full operational capability by 2029.

The envisioned structure comprises five or six companies, including units for close-range combat, deep strikes at ranges of up to 500 kilometers depending on commercial equipment availability, electronic warfare, counter-UAS protection, and an internal trials company intended to fast-track operational testing. The Bundeswehr also plans to equip the formation with loitering munitions, which are currently undergoing evaluation and should reach troops in 2027, according to dpa information.

Unmanned systems have fundamentally reshaped modern combat, accounting for the vast majority of casualties on the battlefield in Ukraine. Western militaries have often lagged in retrofitting their forces, slowed by peacetime procurement practices and protracted political debates over weaponized drones and autonomy.

Key procurement questions surrounding the new unmanned-tech formation remain. The defense ministry has yet to finalize a permanent basing location or award contracts for the specific long-range platforms the regiment requires.

The project seeks to develop open, modular architecture for combat aircraft and sovereign AI technology that gives the government greater control over the tech, rather than having to rely on companies for critical systems, said Col. Cédric, head of the Air Force capability-development office, in a press briefing here on Thursday.

As AI becomes more powerful, the likes of Airbus and BAE Systems in Europe and General Atomics and Anduril in the United States are leveraging the technology to develop collaborative combat aircraft, also referred to as “loyal wingmen.” While many of those projects are company-driven, the French project would keep some of the critical technology under state control.

“What Hypairion is really about is equipping the Air Force and our platforms with architectures that are open, modular and owned by the government,” Col. Cédric said. He was identified only by his first name, in line with the Armed Forces Ministry’s policy for military staff. “Our goal is to move away from proprietary systems that lock down sensors and weaponry.”

The Ministerial Agency for Defence AI will be in charge of providing sovereign AI technology for the project in several areas, particularly command and control as well as mission autonomy, said Col. Thibault, deputy director for AI applications at the agency, known as Amiad. He described mission autonomy as AI that assists pilots with mission planning, in-flight decisions and post-mission analysis.

Amiad already uses AI to coordinate different platforms in the French Army’s Pendragon robotics project, and proposes to create an industrial hub for Hypairion where both traditional aerospace firms and smaller startups can interact with the project, an approach tested in Pendragon.

“The point of the Hypairion project is for the French state to retain control of the overall architecture and to be able to integrate the most capable startups or industrial companies,” Col. Thibault said. He said companies might join and leave the project, while Hypairion retains its capabilities in-house.

The Air Force is modifying two Mirage 2000s fighters at Mont-de-Marsan airbase to become AI test beds, adding a new computer that will allow to test “all kinds of use cases” starting by the end of the year, according to Col. Cédric. Mont-de-Marsan in southwest France is home to the Escadron de chasse et d’expérimentation, a dedicated fighter squadron for testing and evaluation.

Development will be incremental, and the first stage of Hypairion won’t necessarily be about having an operational capability, but will look at areas such as energy consumption and system interfacing, Col. Cédric said. First use cases being considered include using AI to optimize flight paths or tactical decisions such as when to deploy air-to-air or air-to-ground weapons.

The unmanned aircraft set to fly in 2028 will be a test platform and may not be the future wing-man drone planned for France’s Rafale jet as part of the fighter’s future F5 standard, though the experimentation will help pick a suitable platform later in the decade, Col. Cédric said.

The DGA has set a target data of 2033 for the first version of the Rafale F5, but will work on collaborative platforms within the framework of the current F4 standard before then, said General Engineer of Armaments Sébastien, in charge of the Rafale program at the directorate.

The goal of integrating AI on the Rafale is to help crews manage the “absolutely phenomenal cognitive load” to maintain future operational superiority, he said. The armaments engineer cited the Talios laser-designation pod from Thales, set to be delivered to the armed forces in 2027, as a concrete application of AI, able to scan an area and provide a fighter crew a list of potential targets.

Col. Cédric described a hypothetical future in which a fighter crew would carry out a mission in the morning, in between missions identify an adaptation against an enemy countermeasure, and take off again in the afternoon with updated software. That will require system architectures to evolve, he said.

The French Air Force officer likened future manned and unmanned platforms to “flying computers” on which the keyboard, screen or software could be changed without compromising security. The goal of the architecture being developed within Hypairion is to separate the flight-safety aspect from the ability to carry out missions, he said.

The Air Force doesn’t envisage a future with only unmanned aircraft, for both ethical and operational reasons, according to the colonel, who said the decision to deploy weapons remains a human one, and AI can make mistakes. “Humans can be augmented or supplemented by AI, but the assessment of the operational situation, tactical judgment, and so on, these are still entirely the domain of humans.”

As the Air Force prepares the Rafale F5 standard, “a true mid-life overhaul of the aircraft,” focus areas include adequacy of hardware resources, as the system needs to be able to handle complex calculations, Sébastien at the DGA said. Another focus is system openness, meaning “the armed forces must be able to tailor artificial intelligence according to their own needs and so dispose of an open system.”

The Rafale’s F4 standard already includes an initial level of openness through a tablet connected to the mission system, and the F5 standard will seek to broaden the scope of data available to the tablet, give it access to the mission system’s computing resources, and improve the ability to interface with onboard communication systems and data links, according to the DGA engineer.

“This in particular will make it possible, and without waiting for the deployment of the F5 standard, to control autonomous combat platforms from the Rafale,” Sébastien said.

While France relies on Dassault Aviation and other major industrial partners for the Rafale to develop AI in the fighter’s major systems, the armed forces want to ensure operational autonomy, meaning having “the ability to tailor the AI to the specific operational needs of the theater,” the engineer said.

Hypairion will work on a road map covering usage concepts, doctrine, scaling up the work force as well as the actual equipment, resulting in a first full-scale trial of collaborative combat drones flying alongside fighter jets in 2028, according to Col. Cédric.

“The challenge for the Air and Space Force is ultimately to determine what a fighter squadron will look like in 2035 or 2040, once all these systems are potentially integrated into the squadron,” Col. Cédric said. “Today, it’s actually quite rare to come across computer scientists in a fighter squadron. Perhaps tomorrow, that will be a daily occurrence.”

Then he played an AI-generated clip of what he meant: a robopunk mix of humanoid and crab-like ground robots skittering across a barren front line, doing work that is still too complicated for the robots Ukraine fields today.

The video laid out Fedorov’s vision for an Army of Robots, a force of two-legged upright and other ground robots that would take over many of the front line’s most dangerous but necessary jobs from soldiers.

“Our idea is to combine engineers, startups and capital into one ecosystem so we can launch humanoid-like robots on the battlefield,” Fedorov told Defense News in an exclusive interview after his presentation.

“We want to eventually substitute our infantry with these robots.”

To get there, Fedorov is calling on specialists in robotics, AI, sensors and autonomous systems to pool their talent in the kind of concentrated wartime push that built the first atomic bomb, and to focus it on the machines he says will one day replace Ukraine’s infantry.

The 35-year-old aims for the group to have its first confirmed battlefield result from a humanoid-like robot within six months and, within a year, an assault in which robots take on the most dangerous parts of a mission with no infantry alongside them.

To hit the six-month mark, there isn’t time to spend on research and development, he said, so he will begin by investing in companies with weapons that have already been tested and shown some market viability.

Fedorov wants Ukraine to seize the initiative in the war’s next technological cycle before Russia – whose far larger army and industrial base let it scale new weapons quickly – gets there first.

“Russia always thinks about new strategies, how to hack our frontlines,” he said. “We need to be the first side to hack our frontlines.”

Robots are only one of the defense tech areas that the former minister plans to develop within the new project.

“It could be robots, it could be autonomous systems,” he said. “We will have three key directions: sensors and robots, cheaper anti-jet-Shahed missiles, and AI strike drones and missiles.”

Under Fedorov’s plan, members of the Army of Robots will identify a battlefield problem, find a technical solution and a team, provide resources for development, test the product with troops in real conditions and scale what works.

It is the same model he used for the Army of Drones, which he started in 2022 as Ukraine’s digital transformation minister and which opened the market to Ukrainian drone makers, launched government procurement and operator training and helped form the first strike drone units.

“The Army of Drones … changed everything in our country and in the world and, I think, in the future of the world,” he said. “Now we are trying to build the same ecosystem for robots.”

Ukrainian troops already lean heavily on ground robots for assaults and basic tasks, carrying out more than 25,000 logistics and evacuation missions in August – 3.3 times more than in January, according to the Defense Ministry.

But most of the futuristic robot designs featured in Fedorov’s video, humanoids included, are not yet used in combat in Ukraine today, and the ground robots that are in use almost always have a human operator at the controls, usually over Starlink.

Fedorov said the ambitious effort will involve multiple companies working on different stages of the product lifecycle, with some making components, some assembling complete robots and others developing software to run them.

“We have some funds for these first companies,” Fedorov said, declining to name names. “It means that we have two or three companies that will be our partners in these directions.”

The Army of Robots will include a venture fund to invest in technology teams, its own defense-tech companies and a research and development arm, according to a press statement issued after the announcement.

The initiative comes weeks after Fedorov announced that he was starting a new defense company, with Palantir CEO Alex Karp as its first investor.

Fedorov told Defense News the company will start with a corporate fund and may later launch its own venture fund.

The biggest challenge facing the development and deployment of these next-gen robots is the necessary speed of innovation, Fedorov said.

Ukraine has to field these robots fast enough to save its infantry and stay ahead of Russia, which he said has learned to copy Ukraine’s battlefield innovations and scale them rapidly.

Ukraine, meanwhile, is heading into another winter of Russian strikes with air-defense interceptors in short supply.

The weekend Fedorov made his announcement, Russian drones hit kindergartens and university buildings in Kyiv, struck a large civilian hospital and destroyed a food market and multiple gas stations outside the city, killing at least three people and injuring dozens in a combined aerial attack that lasted days.

“We don’t have enough time,” he said. “We need to achieve these results as soon as possible.”

Major Spanish daily El Mundo published the article, which was based on testimony from an anonymous Lithuanian intelligence source, late Wednesday local time.

According to the paper, the CIA had assessed that Spain, France or Italy may be the targets of these attacks, with drones launching from international waters in the Mediterranean and traveling to the coastal countries over the course of an hour or two.

The Gerbera drone was selected because of its small size – it has a wingspan of just 2.5 meters – which allows it to be concealed easily, El Mundo wrote. The drones have a maximum range of 600 kilometers, depending on load and environmental conditions, and carry a relatively small warhead that would be effective at starting a fire, destroying exposed infrastructure components or causing political and economic turmoil.

The drones were to be transported hidden in containers, which was described as being “not difficult at all,” before being catapult-launched for their attack missions on the Western Mediterranean NATO members, according to El Mundo’s sourcing.

Lithuania and other European countries were reportedly made aware of this threat shortly after the CIA director made an unannounced and secretive visit to Moscow aboard a U.S. military plane on Aug. 25.

According to El Mundo, an key CIA report was rumored to be circulating in European leadership circles in mid-September, coinciding with French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to convene the Defense Council on Sept. 16 and then summon all party leaders and the 2027 presidential candidates to the Élysée Palace two days later.

The El Mundo report has not been independently corroborated.

The perceived threat of Russian kinetic action has increased significantly across European capitals this year, owing to heightened sabotage and hybrid warfare activity generally attributed to Moscow. Airspace violations by Russian drones along NATO’s eastern flank have become increasingly commonplace, leading to several instances of the alliance’s fighter jets shooting down intruding unmanned aerial vehicles.

A year ago, 19 unarmed Russian drones entered Polish airspace, the largest airspace violation to date, and one that was widely assessed to have been a deliberate provocation and test of NATO’s response.

The prospect of launching from Russian merchant ships has long been suspected in European policy circles, with coastal sightings of unidentified UAVs sometimes coinciding with the presence of Russian “shadow fleet” ships. In February of this year, a Swedish Navy vessel detected and jammed a drone taking off from a Russian intelligence ship in the Öresund Strait, coinciding with a visit of the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Scandinavian country.

A new step on the escalation ladder was reached in early August, when an explosive-laden drone was found near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft and a separate plane collided with a drone mid-air at Germany’s Leipzig airport, a key freight hub in the NATO country. After a month-long investigation, German authorities officially attributed the attack to Russia.

On Sept. 19, the major pro-Russian Telegram channel Rybar published a map titled “Russian medicine against French arrogance,” suggesting supplying Algeria with Geran-5 drones to strike French aeronautical factories, military bases, nuclear plants and petrochemical sites, El Mundo reported.

Even non-NATO, landlocked European countries are taking note and stepping up their preparedness. The Austrian military has launched a “large exercise” to practice counter-drone measures and air defense, Austrian public media reported on Thursday. The drill will involve 300 soldiers spread across several townships in eastern Austria, as well as Mistral ground-to-air missiles, 35-millimeter cannons and electronic warfare measures.

Japan paid roughly $163 million for Northrop Grumman to manufacture each of its three RQ-4B Block 30i Global Hawks nearly a decade ago.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) on Sept. 16 revealed that it lost contact with the high-altitude drone at 12:55 p.m., before losing its radar signature three minutes later over international waters.

The JASDF’s 502nd Squadron operates its Global Hawks from Misawa Air Base in northern Japan. Before crashing, the drone had taken off at 10.20 a.m. on an unspecified mission, with JASDF Chief of Staff Gen. Takehiro Morita only divulging, “This particular flight was not a training exercise.”

One mission for Japanese Global Hawks, which can stay aloft for 32 hours at altitudes of up to 60,000 ft, is monitoring North Korean missile launch preparations. They are also useful for keeping an eye on Chinese military activities.

Morita said a Japan Coast Guard helicopter spotted debris in the water just 50 minutes after it had lost contact. Other assets spotted further wreckage and took photos, enabling precise identification of the aircraft.

No cause of the accident was revealed.

Japan received its first Global Hawk in March 2022, with the other two arriving later that year. Their integrated payload contains an electro-optic/infrared sensor, synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indicator.

The Global Hawk purchase was controversial in Japan given their enormous cost and the fact that the U.S. retained tight control over the aircraft’s technology and the processing of gathered data.

Global Hawks possess the longest reach of any Japanese drone, so the loss of one among such a small fleet will be sorely missed.

However, as Japan increasingly prioritizes unmanned technologies, the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force is planning to induct the first of 23 MQ-9B SeaGuardians in 2027. Although these drones have a shorter endurance and range than the Global Hawk, Tokyo will use them for maritime domain awareness.

Japan’s draft 2027 defense budget requested US$1.88 billion for the first 17 SeaGuardians. These will take over some of the missions currently performed by P-1 and older P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft.

Incidentally, the U.S. Air Force currently has three RQ-4B Global Hawks stationed at Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, after relocating them from Guam in May to avoid the typhoon season.

The United States planned to quickly retire all its Global Hawks, but it will now keep operating them until 2033. After that, there will be only three in South Korea and two in Japan still flying.

The drone entered Lithuanian airspace from Russian ally Belarus after midnight and was shot down near the southern village of Pratkunai not far from the city of Kaunas, the Lithuanian national crisis management centre said.

“Last night, again, the Italian pilots have intervened and they have shot down a threat that most probably came from Russia”, Crosetto told reporters at Siauliai Air Base, where Italian fighters are based as part of the NATO Baltic Air Defence mission.

“The presence of Italian aircraft here is the clear demonstration of the value of the Atlantic alliance for Italy and what it means to be an ally,” he said after meeting crews with Lithuanian Defense Minister Robertas Kaunas.

Russia did not immediately comment on the incident.

Kaunas said on social media the drone carried an explosive.

After the drone debris is examined, “then we will be able to say clearly, whether this is a Russian drone and it’s possibly a provocation, or whether it is another country’s drone,” he told reporters.

Ukrainian drones have repeatedly entered NATO airspace in the Baltic region in recent months. Kyiv says they were steered off course by Russian signal jamming.

Drone alert

A drone alert had been issued in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius and the surrounding region earlier on Tuesday.

The Lithuanian Army shared video from the site of the crash, showing debris scattered in the grass. Some of the parts appeared to be made of wood and some appeared charred.

Fighters with the NATO Baltic Air Defence mission have patrolled the skies of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia since the Baltic countries joined the alliance in 2004. The mission’s jets shot down stray Ukrainian drones over Estonia in May, and over Latvia in June and August.

Military drones straying into the airspace of Russia’s neighbors have stoked concerns that Russia’s war in Ukraine is spilling over NATO’s borders.

Ukraine has stepped up long-range drone attacks on Russia, including in the Baltic Sea area.

Echodyne opened a manufacturing facility in Washington state last July, and is considering establishing a manufacturing presence in Europe to benefit from the booming counter-drone market there.

Eben Frankenberg, the company’s CEO, told Defense News at the MSPO defense show here that Echodyne has longstanding cooperation with Kongsberg. The integration of its radars into the company’s Protector RS4 and Protector RS6 remote weapon stations will further increase Echodyne’s visibility in European markets, he said.

Echodyne’s solutions will make “those remote weapon stations, which weren’t originally designed to counter drone threats, effective at countering drone threats,” Frankenberg said. “And this is something we do with a lot of companies.”

With a surging demand for miniaturized radars that ensure detection and fire-control support for various counter-drone systems in Europe, Echodyne is also considering investing in establishing a manufacturing presence in Europe.

“There’s obviously a big European demand and there’s rightfully some interest from European countries in having more local content,” the CEO said. “We’re thinking about where it would make the most sense.”

In July 2026, Echodyne said it opened an 86,350-square-foot facility under a $40 million investment. The U.S. plant will eventually be able to produce more than 30,000 radar systems per year, according to data from Echodyne.

“Part of the plan with the new facility was that it gives us a template or blueprint to be able to open other new facilities in the future. Because now we know exactly all the machines we need to have, all the workstations, the number of people to equip them,” Frankenberg said. “So it does set us up for that in the future.”

Brian Moran, the company’s vice president for Europe, told Defense News at the MSPO defense show here that, while advancing the Barracuda project in partnership with PGZ, the company is also offering two autonomous aircraft to accompany the country’s envisioned fleets of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets and Boeing’s AH-64E Apache attack helicopters.

“One of the flagship programs for Anduril has been collaborative combat aircraft, CCA, where our Fury has been chosen by the United States Air Force as a program of record,” Moran said. “With Poland getting its F-35s, Fury is tailor-made to partner with an F-35 as a loyal wingman and as a force multiplier to keep men and women in uniform out of harm’s way.”

In addition to 32 F-35 jets, the first of which arrived in Poland last May, Warsaw is also awaiting the delivery of 96 Apache helicopters. With the latter program in mind, Anduril is in talks with Polish officials over a potential sale of the Thunder drone, following its unveiling at July’s Farnborough Airshow.

“In July, we launched Thunder which is an autonomous collaborative platform for the Apache attack helicopter,” Moran said. “And just like Fury operating with an F-35, with Poland getting all these Apaches, having Thunder is a force multiplier, especially as Poland will have to train a lot of pilots for 96 Apaches.”

Deliveries of the 96 helicopters with related gear and weapons are scheduled to begin in 2028. Once the copters are supplied to the country, Poland’s military is expected to be the second-largest user of the Apaches in the world after the United States.

Last year, the Polish defense ministry signed a $300 million contract to lease eight AH-64D Apaches from the United States in anticipation of the planned deliveries.

Speaking on Sept. 8, the first day of the annual MSPO defense industry show in Kielce, Poland, company representatives said the vehicle is fitted with a more powerful version of the stationary Cheongwang laser that South Korea’s military has used since 2024.

Cheongwang has been deployed at strategically important sites, including near the Blue House, the office and residence of the nation’s president.

“We are currently in talks with a number of countries over potential exports of the Cheongwang laser, including potential clients from Europe, Asia and the Middle East,” Hyungun Park, the manager of the laser system business team at Hanwha Systems, told Defense News.

One of the biggest advantages of the Cheongwang results from the fact that each laser shot costs around 2,000 Korean won ($1.5) which makes the weapon a highly cost-efficient way to counter drones, Park said.

To cater to the needs of militaries seeking a mobile laser solution capable of tracking fast-moving targets, the company has combined its laser technology with a wheeled platform, using the Tigon eight-wheel-drive armored personnel carrier.

“Our new product is the 50 kW Laser Armored Vehicle. We have developed a prototype, and we plan to launch serial production of this vehicle by the end of 2027,” according to the executive.