PARIS — MBDA UK won an order to supply the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy with the DragonFire drone-zapping laser in a £316 million ($414 million) deal, with the first of the direct-energy weapons for drone defense to be fitted on a navy destroyer by 2027.
DragonFire successfully took down a high-speed drone in recent trials at the Hebrides testing range in Scotland, and will be the first high-power laser capability to enter service from a European nation, the MoD said in a Nov. 20 statement.
With relatively low-cost drones having become ubiquitous on the modern battlefield, the race has been on to find economically viable countermeasures. The DragonFire laser system costs £10 a shot, compared to upwards of hundreds of thousands of pounds per shot for traditional missile-based air defense, according to the MoD.
“This high-power laser will see our Royal Navy at the leading edge of innovation in NATO, delivering a cutting-edge capability to help defend the U.K. and our allies in this new era of threat,” Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard said in the statement.
MBDA UK is working on DragonFire together with QinetiQ and Leonardo, with the capability to be delivered almost five years ahead of the original schedule, according tot the MoD, which said the system is accurate enough to hit a £1 coin from a kilometer away.
“This latest contract for DragonFire is another significant milestone,” MBDA UK Managing Director Chris Allam said. “It allows us to continue with the next phase of the program and re-affirms the U.K.’s intent to be at the forefront of laser directed energy weapons.”
The DragonFire laser system in January 2024 for the first time destroyed an aerial target with a high-powered test shot. In the most recent tests, the weapon shot down drones that can fly up to 650 kilometers per hour, the MoD said.
The U.K.’s Strategic Defence Review backed the country’s work on directed energy weapons with additional investments of nearly £1 billion for the current parliamentary term, the MoD said. Work on DragonFire will help to create and sustain 590 jobs across the U.K., according to the ministry.
MBDA will deliver the new systems to the Royal Navy from 2027, with DragonFire to be fitted to a Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer by that time.
While pan-European MBDA is best known for missile systems such as Mistral and the Aster family of air-defense effectors, the company is involved in laser projects in all its main stakeholder countries. Executives are betting that laser directed-energy weapons will be part of any future layered air defense.
Rheinmetall and MBDA last month supplied Germany with a laser-weapon demonstrator for naval use, while the missile maker is working with Leonardo in Italy to develop a light laser weapon for navy units. MBDA together with Safran in 2022 acquired a majority stake in French laser company Cilas, which has been developing the Helma-P counter-UAS weapon for France’s armed forces.
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.
