HERSTAL, Belgium — One of Europe’s biggest air defense companies is warning that its top secret factories are being overflown by increasing numbers of drones, and it wants clear rules on how to jam or bring them down.
“We are seeing more drones than what was the case a few months ago,” said Alain Quevrin, country director for Thales Belgium. He highlighted sightings over the company’s Évegnée Fort site in the eastern Liège region, the only Belgian facility where it is licensed to assemble and store explosives for its 70 mm rockets.
His comments come amid mounting reports of unmanned aerial vehicles, including in Poland, Romania, Germany, Norway and Denmark in the past month. Some, like the war drones overflying Poland and Romania, were Russian, while the origin of others has been harder to determine.
In response, Copenhagen last week temporarily banned drone flights, while NATO has launched a new Eastern Sentry program to tackle critical gaps in the alliance’s air defenses.
“We are concerned” about these developments, Quevrin said, which come at a time when the company is racing to double its manufacturing capacity of unguided and laser-guided FZ275 rockets to 70,000 within the next few years, as long as there is clear demand.
The French multinational has mounted a “huge effort” to install detection systems across its facilities, he explained. The company said it could use jammers to block the signal needed to control the drones and bring them down. But the problem is that “we are not allowed — legally,” Quevrin said. One concern with bringing down drones is that they can cause damage or injure people if they fall.
Now, countries such as Belgium must spell out “what is the right process” for such sightings, Quevrin said, including where police responsibilities end and that of companies begin.
“The process needs to be clarified,” he said, speaking as dozens of technicians worked meticulously to piece together the company’s signature munition in spotless white laboratory workshops behind a glass window. “It is a situation all of us have to face.”
Belgium’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment by POLITICO.
Call to arms
Quevrin said Thales Belgium is seeing “unbelievable” demand for its rockets as NATO scrambles to secure its skies. A majority of its current production is going to Ukraine.
The rockets made in its Herstal site and Évegnée Fort factory can be used against drones, with the laser-guided version targeting larger, high-altitude UAVs like Iranian-designed Shaheds, while their unguided siblings instead release thousands of steel balls upon detonation to take out swarms of smaller, low-altitude drones.
In recent weeks, the military alliance has drawn sharp criticism for its response to recent airspace incursions, after NATO warplanes used multimillion-dollar missiles to shoot down Russian drones made of wood and foam each costing about $10,000.
Thales has received dozens of requests for its rockets since the incursion into Poland, Quevrin said, given their 8-kilometer-range rockets use NATO-wide standards that can fit into existing weapons systems.
“It’s a plug-and-play solution just to address more and more types of targets,” he said. Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland are among the company’s top NATO clients, and the firm says its rockets are four times cheaper than alternatives on the market.
Still, to meet that demand, Quevrin said, the EU needs to help the industry overcome another hurdle: setting up a body to organize cross-border projects and procurement for both companies and governments.
The EU is legally forbidden from directly funding weapons and military equipment, but has rolled out several initiatives aiming to facilitate joint arms procurement by member countries, including through its €150 billion SAFE loans-for-weapons program.
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