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France Stakes Claim to UAV Leadership |
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(Source: defense-aerospace.com; published June 18, 2004)
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By Giovanni de Briganti
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PARIS --- France last week staked its claim to future dominance of Europe’s combat aircraft sector, as Dassault Aviation and EADS announced they had teamed to pursue all future opportunities in the field of manned and unmanned combat aircraft.
While the agreement will initially focus on two unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) demonstrators, its real significance lies in that the two companies, foregoing a long history of difficult relations, have teamed to jointly develop whatever aircraft, manned or unmanned, will eventually replace the incoming generation of fighters, which includes the Eurofighter, Rafale and Gripen, in 20 or 30 years’ time.
EADS is a major partner of Eurofighter, while Dassault is the Rafale’s prime contractor. Sweden’s Saab, which is one of the French UCAV project’s initial partners, is prime contractor for the Gripen.
The Dassault/EADS agreement supersedes a previous teaming arrangement, signed in the early 1990s by Dassault with BAE Systems, to jointly develop a common successor to Eurofighter and Rafale. That agreement fell apart when Britain opted to join the Joint Strike Fighter instead of a future European program, Dassault Aviation CEO Charles Edelstenne told reporters during a June 17 press conference here, clearing the decks for this French-dominated initiative.
Dassault will lead the joint initiative in the field of combat aircraft, through its prime contractorship of the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) technology demonstrator program, which it has christened Neuron. EADS will lead the program to develop a reconnaissance UAV demonstrator known as EuroMALE (European Medium Altitude, Long Endurance UAV), but each company will also contribute its know-how to the other program.
“This agreement creates a coherent base for our military aircraft industries,” Dassault's Edelstenne said. “If other European initiatives appear, governments will make them converge into a consolidated program, which both Dassault and EADS will support,” Philippe Camus, co-CEO of EADS, told the same press conference.
The clear implication is that European industry is keen to avoid a repetition of past mistakes, when its competitiveness was heavily penalized by the waste and duplication involved in developing three separate combat aircraft at the same time.
With the support of the French defense ministry, Dassault and EADS have crafted a specific program structure to nurture their cooperation and to secure their future pre-eminence in the European market. The two UAV programs will be managed by the French defense ministry, and not by a European executive agency such as OCCAR (Organisation Conjointe de Coopération en matière d'ARmement, the nascent European arms agency), to avoid delays and bureaucracy.
The two French firms are also trying to pre-empt any future competition by offering minority stakes to any European country willing to contribute funding and technology to either UAV project.
France, together with Greece and Sweden, has decided to spend up to 300 million euros to develop the UCAV demonstrator. In parallel, EADS is prime contractor of the EuroMALE in which Dassault will be responsible for the flight segment and systems architecture. A funding envelope of about 300 million euros has also been earmarked for EuroMALE.
Other European countries have been invited to join both programs, and Sweden (with Saab) is a leading candidate to join EuroMALE, according to the French ministry of defense. In both programs, “the role of new industry members will be proportional to the financial contribution of their member government,” Edelstenne said, and no to their country’s planned off-take of future production as has been the case of most past cooperative programs.
Thus, if Spain confirms its intention of contributing about 20 million euros to UCAV development costs, Spanish industry (in this case EADS Casa) will obtain a stake of about 10-15%, and will focus on composite materials where it has significant expertise. Other European candidates are Switzerland (which, according to some sources, has already signed on to the program), and Italy for the EuroMALE strategic reconnaissance UAV, with Germany as a more remote prospect.
Sweden and Greece have already joined the Dassault-led UCAV program, now also designated Neuron, in which their national industries, Saab AB and Hellenic Aerospace Industry, will take significant minority stakes. UCAV partners will also be offered a role in the EuroMALE reconnaissance UAV, led by EADS, in proportion to their countries’ share of development funding.
EuroMALE will be use technologies developed by Israel Aircraft Industries for its Eagle 2 program. Dassault and EADS are buying nearly 300 million euros’ worth of UAV technology from state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries, the French defense ministry announced June 16, in the largest weapons deal in decades involving two countries. While the technologies are mainly oriented to the EuroMALE project, they will also have applications for the UCAV. However, IAI will not be a partner in either program, and its role will be limited to that of a technology vendor.
Another French UAV manufacturer, Sagem, is teamed with EADS on EuroMALE. Under an agreement announced by EADS on June 14, Sagem will be responsible for the technical domains of line of sight datalink, optronic payloads and interoperability functions between EuroMALE, the French SDTI system and the Sperwer UAV made by Sagem and operated by five other countries. French defense electronics group Thales will also be involved in EuroMALE, and will contribute its expertise to the development of the ground segment and related systems.
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