Military drones: current trends in the market

Long dom­in­ated by the Amer­ic­ans, the rap­idly expand­ing mil­it­ary drone mar­ket is see­ing the arrival of new state play­ers, includ­ing devel­op­ing coun­tries with a region­al power base. As the range of products expands and the rep­er­toire of uses con­tin­ues to grow, the armed forces are increas­ingly draw­ing on the resources offered by civil­ian manufacturers. 

The glob­al mar­ket for civil and mil­it­ary drones was worth $4bn in 2015 and it is now boom­ing. A Sen­ate report estim­ated in 2017 that it would reach $14bn by 2025¹, and a spe­cial­ised insti­tute has put for­ward the fig­ure of $72bn by 2028, with an aver­age annu­al growth rate of 14.4%².

This growth is due to the sharp increase in demand for drones used by the mil­it­ary, for everything from sur­veil­lance to leth­al inter­ven­tion and trans­port. Hun­dreds of com­pan­ies are cur­rently work­ing on drone tech­no­logy on both a small and large scale, and state and non-state act­ors are look­ing to integ­rate drones into their mil­it­ary pro­grammes. NATO dis­tin­guishes between sev­er­al types of mil­it­ary drones.

The most sig­ni­fic­ant sec­tor, both tac­tic­ally and in terms of the mar­ket, is that of MALE (Medi­um Alti­tude Long Endur­ance) drones. Ini­tially dom­in­ated by the Amer­ic­ans, with the Gen­er­al Atom­ics Pred­at­or, the first examples were delivered in 1995 and were armed in the early 2000s. For a long time, they had a mono­poly with 360 units delivered (mainly to the US armed forces), but were gradu­ally replaced by the Reap­er, of which more than 300 units were delivered to the US armed forces. Allies of the United States – mainly but not exclus­ively with­in NATO – have acquired sev­er­al dozen models. 

Along­side the United States, the oth­er lead­ing coun­try in the field for a long time was Israel, with Israel Aerospace Indus­tries, which first launched the Hunter in the 1990s and then the IAI Her­on, presen­ted at the Par­is Air Show in 1999. The lat­ter equipped the Tsa­hal since the mid-2000s and was sold for export, not­ably its French ver­sion – the Har­fang from EADS. Europeans do not have much of a pres­ence in the MALE UAV mar­ket, neither as cus­tom­ers nor as man­u­fac­tur­ers. The Talari­on pro­ject by EADS was aban­doned in the early 2010s due to lack of fund­ing, and a new MALE UAV pro­ject is strug­gling to get off the ground. 

Depend­ing on the ten­ets of vari­ous nation­al armies, leth­al use may be author­ised but since the 2010s, com­bat drones have been used more and more fre­quently. Along­side the ultra-soph­ist­ic­ated air­craft developed by the Amer­ic­ans and Israel­is, Tur­key launched the fam­ous Bayrak­tar TB2, developed by Baykar from its pre­de­cessor, a sur­veil­lance drone launched in 2007. The TB2 flew for the first time in 2014 and was armed in Decem­ber 2015.

Con­sidered a ‘low-cost’ ‘drone due to its price ($5m) – four times less than the Amer­ic­an Reap­er (it is also smal­ler) – the Bayrak­tar bor­rows some of its tech­no­lo­gies from part­ner coun­tries, such as Canada for its L3Harris WESCAM MX-15D elec­tro-optic­al sys­tem. But the involve­ment of these drones in the second war in Nagorno-Kara­bakh led Ott­awa to ban the export of these sys­tems. The idea of a drone industry as an assembly of applic­a­tions provided by sub­con­tract­ors must there­fore be con­sidered with cau­tion as is often the case in the mil­it­ary field, these are sov­er­eign tech­no­lo­gies that the coun­try build­ing them must be able to use.

The Bayrak­tar can carry four intel­li­gent laser-guided muni­tions cap­able of des­troy­ing armoured vehicles. It has been used in vari­ous theatres of oper­a­tion, includ­ing Syr­ia and Libya, but above all in Ukraine, where the 20 or so examples deployed enabled Kiev’s forces to reverse the tac­tic­al advant­age giv­en to Moscow by its superi­or­ity in the field of armour.

Some drones can carry four smart, laser-guided muni­tions cap­able of des­troy­ing armoured vehicles.

Next to Tur­key, Iran is anoth­er ref­er­ence coun­try, with a MALE drone, the HESA Shahed-129, and the Shahed-191 stealthy fly­ing wing, both equipped with leth­al mis­siles. Rus­sia reportedly placed an order for these UAVs in 2022, for use in Ukraine. The Rus­si­ans also man­u­fac­ture their own drones, as do the Indi­ans, South Afric­ans, Pakistanis and, of course, the Chinese, whose Wing Loong (1 and 2) and CaiHong (1 to 6) have been sold to oth­er countries.

Europeans are not build­ing MALE com­bat drones. When Ger­many decided in 2018 to acquire MALE drones, it chose Israeli Her­on TPs, which it decided to arm in 2022. How­ever, Europeans – mainly the French and the Brit­ish, togeth­er with Ger­man and Itali­an sup­pli­ers – have developed dif­fer­ent mod­els of tac­tic­al drones used for sur­veil­lance and intel­li­gence pur­poses. EADS’ Bar­racuda and BAe’s Taranis have remained in the plan­ning stage, while Safran’s Patroller is used by the French army and the Egyp­tian armed forces. Thales’ Watch­keep­er WK450 is in ser­vice with the Brit­ish Army. Today, the Organ­isa­tion for Joint Arm­a­ment Cooper­a­tion (OCCAR) is devel­op­ing the future European MALE UAV on behalf of France, Ger­many, Spain and Italy. Air­bus Defence and Space Gmb, assisted by their major part­ners, Dassault Avi­ation, Leonardo, and Space SAU, are pro­du­cing the future “Eurodrone” which will pro­gress­ively replace the Reap­er drones in France.

More than 80 coun­tries are said to have mil­it­ary drones of all types (sur­veil­lance and armed). Over the past two years, more than 15 coun­tries have car­ried out drone strikes, includ­ing Saudi Ara­bia, the United Arab Emir­ates (UAE), Iraq and Nigeria.

Although drones ori­gin­ated in the world of defence, the mar­ket is now driv­en by civil­ian drones, such as the Anafi drone from the French com­pany Par­rot. These pro­fes­sion­al and con­sumer drones are becom­ing increas­ingly power­ful. Avail­able “off the shelf”, these low-cost drones (€3,000-€100,000 each) can be adap­ted for mil­it­ary use, par­tic­u­larly by non-state groups (Hezbol­lah or Islam­ic State), for obser­va­tion mis­sions as well as for armed action.

The dynam­ism of both the civil­ian and mil­it­ary mar­kets, the incor­por­a­tion of tech­no­lo­gies developed for civil­ian use in the fields of secur­ity and sur­veil­lance (photon­ics, optron­ics, AI, image ana­lys­is, sensors of all kinds, etc.), but also in trans­port (autonomy), are lead­ing more and more indus­tri­al play­ers, and more and more var­ied, to invest in this boom­ing industry.

The purely mil­it­ary mar­ket and the civil­ian mar­ket are inter­ming­ling, in a dual tech­no­logy approach: the French com­pany Photonis, lead­er in night vis­ion, offers a cam­era in the form of a micro-cube that can be graf­ted onto drones. Its primary mar­ket is defence, but it is also very inter­ested in the civil­ian secur­ity mar­ket. Rap­id evol­u­tion of drones is bring­ing new chal­lenges: their autonom­ous oper­a­tion, con­nectiv­ity, cooper­a­tion between drones and robots in het­ero­gen­eous swarms, and of course the cyber­se­cur­ity that is essen­tial to these developments.

A par­tic­u­larly dynam­ic field, at the cross­roads between the civil­ian and mil­it­ary sec­tors, is that of coun­ter­ing unmanned aer­i­al sys­tems (CUAS). For example, the DroneCon­trol of the Brazili­an com­pany Neger is an integ­rated sys­tem that detects, loc­ates, tracks and blocks hos­tile drones in secure areas. It is used in Brazil to mon­it­or pris­ons and pre­vent gangs from being able to send drugs to pris­on­ers. The Drone­Buster from France’s T‑OPS is a port­able CUAS tool, the only one of its kind author­ised by the US Depart­ment of Defence. The BXDD sys­tem from Hun­gary’s BHE Bonn Hun­gary Elec­tron­ics is a state-of-the-art solu­tion based on soft­ware defined radio to detect, clas­si­fy and meas­ure the dir­ec­tion of the drone and the RF sig­nal from the remote con­trol. There are also anti-drone guns such as the Dro­ne­Gun MKIII, a com­pact and light­weight UAS coun­ter­meas­ure solu­tion designed for one-handed operation.

Com­bined with mini­atur­isa­tion, the incor­por­a­tion of vari­ous tech­no­lo­gies opens up the range of pos­sib­il­it­ies in a logic of innov­a­tion driv­en by uses. Thirty years ago, the drone was an unmanned air­craft. In 2021, the US Mar­ine Corps tested the Drone40 from the Aus­trali­an start-up Defend­Tex: a tiny drone so named because it can hold a 40 mm gren­ade and drop it almost 20 km from its oper­at­or. The autonom­ous fly­ing gren­ade has a GPS-based auto­pi­lot sys­tem and a port­able ground con­trol sta­tion that com­mu­nic­ates via an encryp­ted radio link. Drones are mil­it­ary tech­no­lo­gies that have been used in the civil­ian sec­tor before return­ing to the mil­it­ary, with all the advant­ages of the civil­ian sec­tor: optim­ised by the com­pet­i­tion, cheap, easy to handle.

Interview by Richard Robert