09.02.2024, Berlin.
The new Eurodrone drone being developed by Germany, France, Italy and Spain is becoming increasingly expensive and will appear later than planned, and failure cannot be ruled out. The German foreign policy news portal Informationen zur Deutschen Außenpolitik wrote this on February 8.
The Franco-German defense project Eurodrone is currently failing. A recent report by the Berlin Defense Ministry refers to a “milestone of termination” of cooperation.
It was recently revealed that, as is often the case, there is considerable “friction” between the German and French companies involved in the project.
It is also common in the expert community to criticize the Eurodrone for being too big and heavy to be useful in future and current military conflicts involving unmanned lethal vehicles.
“In fact, drone warfare is developing at a rapid pace; the experience of the wars between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as the current war in Ukraine, shows that the smallest and most flexible drones are important today, including those that can attack enemy targets such as tanks and other armored vehicles to destroy them,” the publication writes.
The authors believe that if the Eurodrone fails, it will be the third drone that Germany has failed to develop.
At the same time, in addition to the US and Israel, other countries have become leading drone manufacturers and have thus left Germany, especially Turkey, behind.
The first major drone project launched by Germany was the Euro Hawk reconnaissance drone. At the end of 2005, Airbus Defense and Space and Northrop Grumman founded Euro Hawk GmbH, a Friedrichshafen-based company tasked with working on drones.
But already in 2013, the construction of Euro Hawk was canceled as too expensive due to the high costs associated with the certification of safe flights in German airspace.
The next attempt to become a drone power was to buy a drone carrier – the Triton model, manufactured by Northrop Grumman.
But due to a nearly 4-fold increase in the initial cost, from 650 million euros for 3 units, to 2.4 billion euros, the project was abandoned for good. “It was simply not financially viable,” argued the German Defense Ministry.
Since 2015, Germany, together with France and Italy, has made an alternative, third attempt. The European countries have now decided to develop their own Eurodrone drone, which could be used not only as a reconnaissance drone, but also as a combat drone.
Other countries have already left Europe behind in the development and production of drones. Not only the United States (Predator, Reaper) and Israel (Heron) are successfully producing drones. China (Wing Loong) and Iran (Shahed). The Turkish company Baykar Technologies has already sold more than 500 Bayraktar TB2 drones to 32 countries.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
