PARIS — MBDA, Europe’s largest missile maker, unveiled a cheap one-way drone at the Paris Air Show designed to saturate enemy air defenses en masse and clear the way for what the company calls high-value effectors such as cruise missiles.
The drone, for now named simply One-Way Effector, will be mass-produced and cost a fraction of the price of a cruise missile, said Hugo Coqueret, a business development manager at MBDA. The company is partnering with an undisclosed drone maker and a French automotive company to be able to ramp up production to 1,000 drones per month.
The new drone was inspired by the war in Ukraine, where Russian and Ukrainian forces have been using dozens of one-way drones in single attacks to attempt to overwhelm and exhaust defenses. A lesson from the high-intensity warfare in Ukraine is the need for mass, and the new munition is one of the answers offered by MBDA, Coqueret told Defense News in a briefing on Monday
“The mission is really one of saturation,” Coqueret said. “It has been designed to meet this need for the return of mass in the armed forces, to cause saturation of enemy forces.”
The drone presented here on Monday is a new type of product for the missile maker, whose top-end products can cost millions of euros. Coqueret described the effector as “saturation munition” that complements MBDA’s existing portfolio, which includes several cruise missiles including the Scalp and the Taurus.
The jet-engine powered drone will be able to deliver a 40-kg payload at a distance of 500 kilometers, traveling at a speed of 400 kilometers per hour. Design of the new drone started from scratch in December, with the first test flight planned for September or October and a first production batch in 2027.
“It’s relatively fast and carries a significant payload,” Coqueret said. “All of that means that the enemy’s ground-based air defense is forced to destroy it with high value-added systems. Everything is designed to generate saturation.”
The design brief was for a low-cost munition that can be produced in large quantities, and “everything was designed with this in mind, from the parts to be manufactured to the operational procedures for assembly and the supply chain,” Coqueret said. The drone isn’t designed to be stealthy and many components are off-the-shelf to keep cost down.
“Once again, this is a very simple munition, there is no dialogue between munitions, but as they are fired in salvos with a grouping capability, they will be able to form a pack, and it’s this pack that will move towards the target and thus generate this attrition effect,” Coqueret said. “You’re going to use it in the same way as artillery.”
Part of keeping costs low is the production partnership with a French automotive manufacturer, according to the MBDA executive. MBDA is not naming the industrial partner at this time, though Coqueret said it’s not Renault. The French automaker said earlier this month it was expanding into the business of making unmanned aerial vehicles.
The One-Way Effector has been designed to address a need expressed by the French armed forces, and MBDA expects to start consultations with France’s Directorate General for Armament about buying the weapon “soon,” Coqueret said.
Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.
