Paris sends a message of support to Ukraine. The Ministry of the Armed Forces will order 2,000 French-designed remotely operated munitions (MTO) in the coming weeks, the first 100 of which are urgently intended to be delivered to Ukraine by this summer, Sébastien Lecornu announced on Thursday. “I made the decision to order 2,000 remotely operated munitions, both for the needs of the French army and for Ukraine,” declared the Minister of the Armed Forces during a visit to the factory. from the drone manufacturer Delair in Labège, a suburb of Toulouse.
“Kamikaze drones are absolutely fundamental in the conduct of operations” and will be able to constitute a “complement to the Caesar cannon in terms of artillery”, he argued. Currently faced with a shortage of shells, kyiv is using drones loaded with explosives on a large scale, particularly small drones from the civilian market DIYed to carry an explosive charge. Paris intends in particular to take advantage of the feedback provided by the use of these drones in Ukraine to improve protection technologies against electronic warfare and GPS jamming massively used by Russian forces.
The distribution between France and Ukraine not revealed
For Sébastien Lecornu, these first investments in MTOs “are part of an important catch-up effort for our armies” while France is lagging behind in the development of drones due, according to him, to “bad decisions 10-15 years ago” . Last year, seeing the massive use in Ukraine of these MTOs, already used during the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Paris placed an emergency order for nearly a hundred American Switchblade tele-operated munitions.
The order that the ministry is preparing to place is part of the project called Colibri aimed at developing an MTO capable of operating within a radius of 5 km for a unit cost of less than 20,000 euros. It will have passed through two consortia bringing together a drone manufacturer and a pyrotechnics specialist, on one side Delair and Nexter, and on the other the drone manufacturer Novadem and MBDA. The call for projects is however open to other potential competitors.
The first 100 drones intended for kyiv for the summer will, however, be ordered from Delair and Nexter. The distribution between the French army and the Ukrainian needs of the remaining 1,900 was not specified. All must be delivered in 2024-2025.