Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-03-airbus-is-preparing-two-uncrewed-combat-aircraft-from-kratos-for-first-flight-with-a-european

by phasnox • 4 months ago

183 134 4 months ago

airbus.com

markdown• 4 months ago

Airbus selling ai-operated strike drones.

FTFY

RobRivera• 4 months ago

No you didnt

layla5alive• 4 months ago

Cylons

maximinus_thrax3• 4 months ago

Good! Great to hear! EU needs to grow its domestic military industry, the French were right all along.

tomasphan• 4 months ago

They are reprogramming a US built drone to the German datalink equivalent with some AI sprinkled on top. Unfortunately far away from a real industry.

bluegatty4• 4 months ago

That's how it was always done. Nobody invented the whole thing from scratch.

maximinus_thrax3• 4 months ago

Some other country started by _stealing_ US tech and now they arguably have a higher military tech throughput. Everyone has to start somewhere..

busterarm• 4 months ago

The EU already has the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 10th largest share of global arms exports. Losing the 8th place slot due to Brexit.

maximinus_thrax3• 4 months ago

Akshually it's the the 2nd (France), 5th (Germany), 6th (Italy), and 9th (Spain) spots. But that's a bad argument, say.. a way of lying with statistics, considering the 1st place has 43% of the market share AND that exporting arms is not very relevant when the topic du jour is military build-up. The muscovites for example export 7.8% of the market share but that's not that relevant considering they're using the lion's share of military industrial output to terrorize Ukrainians.

sourcegrift• 4 months ago

There's a funny term some cool kids use for them, "drone", I think? Personally I think it's too short to convey the full utility.

Mistletoe• 4 months ago

"Begun, the Clone War has." -Yoda

colechristensen• 4 months ago

The worry being that war will be a lot easier to stomach when none of the combatants are alive.

dlt7137052• 4 months ago

But a robot war is an endless war. There will always be more robots to fight until the economy is completely exhausted.

esafak• 4 months ago

None on the offensive side, perhaps.

XorNot2• 4 months ago

The history of warfare, hell the literal current warfare happening in Ukraine makes this entire argument unbelievably specious.

There were more wars before any type of mechanisation of warfare, with the only slow down really happening after nuclear weapons were developed.

bluegatty4• 4 months ago

They are already on in Ukraine.

icegreentea26• 4 months ago

There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here.

First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots.

Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as a partner SEAD (suppression of air defence) vehicle.

Thirdly, the "MARS" system chattered about looks to be Airbus' open architecture /system of systems pitch that they were developing for FCAS (the European 6th generation fighter program). MARS and all pitches like it are about ways to make individual platforms as software defined as possible, and to get different platforms/instances to really data/function share as much as possible.

If this program goes well, it shows that Airbus' MARS has the flexibility and capability required to just... layer into/ontop of some random other vendor's hardware/software and then "just work". I think it would be major demonstration/validation of the work.

dmix4• 4 months ago

Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch.

Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix.

Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.

icegreentea26• 4 months ago

Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.

The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).

Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.

ironhaven• 4 months ago

Manned-Unmanned teaming is not a new concept created in the last couple months to placate fighter pilots in the age of ai. With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.

If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US

budman12• 4 months ago

mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners.

'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's).

i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.

mikkupikku• 4 months ago

My read is that the "loyal wingman" thing is a ploy to get around all the pilots / expilots in Air Force brass who might otherwise gatekeep anything they think is a threat to the careers of human pilots. These people want the Air Force to be about hotshots flying planes; this is part of the reason the US spun off the space stuff, because Air Force brass is institutionally incapable of taking anything other than manned flight seriously.

generic920342• 4 months ago

You expect drones to replace civil passenger aircraft any time soon?

numpad02• 4 months ago

Those low-cost drones are just a fad. Fiber optic TV guided exploding thing is literally the oldest kind of anti-tank missiles. Russian winged cruise missiles are even older, early cold war kinds of stuff. It just so happens that none of Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc has air dominance nor proper war time production capacities, and so they must resort to substituting military equipment with remixes of AliExpress stuffs.

Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.

GuB-42• 4 months ago

One argument is that fighter airplanes are becoming more like airborne control centers than actual fighters. You don't get the same level of situational awareness from a remote controlled drone camera than from inside a cockpit. And if you look at the F-35, what is often put forward is its stealth and communication capabilities. Radars, electronic warfare, etc... that's what's important, and yes, having a human in the loop is important too. These planes can dogfight too, but ideally, they shouldn't, but they still have to be able to defend themselves when things go wrong.

Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.

unangst• 4 months ago

A modern V-2. Nothing could possibly go wrong!

chaostheory2• 4 months ago

Yeah, I believe Kratos (who is doing this joint venture with Airbus) and AeroVironment are the current leaders in the space. Not sure what happens when Anduril goes public

icegreentea26• 4 months ago

I think the USA has ~3ish airframes/systems that are roughly in this category:

* The Kratos Valkyrie with the USMC in a SEAD role

* Anduril (YFQ-44) and General Atomics (YFQ-42) are battling it out for the USAF's CCA Increment 1 contract (we're apparently supposed to get a decision on that this year) - with Increment 2 probably getting spun up pretty soon

* USN has the Boeing MQ-25 as an drone tanker... once that gets up the speed, I'm fairly certain it's going to morph into something strike capable

Elsewhere, Boeing Australia's Ghost Bat seems to be doing well as well.

chaostheory2• 4 months ago

Does general atomics have plans on spinning off and going public?

dom96• 4 months ago

Is this the EU's version of the Shahed drones? or is it something different?

icegreentea26• 4 months ago

It's completely different. Shaheds are low cost one way attack drones. They're basically just very cost efficient cruise missiles with fresh marketing (and to be fair, the cost efficiency is a true categorical difference).

These drones are "helpers" for fighter jets. It's a type of role that is still in development (no one has an operational collaborative combat aircraft as far as I understand), both technically and in concept.

But the basic idea is that you'll have drones that can somewhat keep up with your fighter jets and help it do stuff that might be too risky. Maybe fly ahead, or be the one with the active emissions or sensors or whatever. Or maybe it's just a way to increase the amount of ordnance/sensors you can fly per sortie / generate from a given amount of training/flight hours in a year.

lloeki• 4 months ago

Somehow closest concept I imagine is shmup pods.

https://shmup.fandom.com/wiki/Pod

twalichiewicz4• 4 months ago

This seems to be the generally agreed upon direction defense companies are going, but a couple architectural concerns come to mind regarding this "Manned-Unmanned-Teaming" approach:

- Even if the XQ-58 has a low radar cross section, a swarm of four drones flying in formation with a non-stealthy Eurofighter significantly increases the aggregate probability of detection. Unless these drones are performing active electronic countermeasures or "blinking" to spoof radar returns, they’re essentially a giant "here we are" sign for any modern radar. I wonder if they've compensated via the flight software to manage formation geometry to minimize the group's total observable signature?

- Anti-air systems will prioritize the command aircraft (the Eurofighter) immediately. If the C2 link is severed (kinetic kill, high-power jamming) what is the state-machine logic for the subordinates? Do they revert to a fail-passive (return to base) or -active (continue last assigned strike) mode? Without a human-in-the-loop, rules of engagement issues are abound. (I'm not even accounting for the fact that the drones probably rely on calculations from the command craft, so edge-computing will factor in as well.)

- They're calling these "attritable," but at $4M a pop plus the cost of the sensors, they aren't exactly disposable. Is the cost-per-kill for an adversary’s interceptor missile actually higher than the cost of the drone it's hitting?

blobcode• 4 months ago

(1) Aircraft rarely fly in anything close to formation in combat - large gaps are the norm (1-10 miles), and one would think that increased distance is something that could be exploited by an unmanned platform (able to take more risk, etc.)

(2) Remains to be seen.

(3) Individual Patriot missiles are around that price point, with S300/S400 anywhere from 500k-2M depending on capability. One would think that cost-per-kill would be favorable considering the increased capability granted.

twalichiewicz4• 4 months ago

At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot.

You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engagement envelope while sending cheaper submunitions (likely using something like these Ragnaroks (~$150k) https://www.kratosdefense.com/newsroom/kratos-unveils-revolu...) to do the actual baiting.

d_silin• 4 months ago

In terms of military technology we now have aerial and naval drones clearly outperforming previous generation of ships and aircraft in "bang for buck".

Land warfare is next on the list: https://time.com/article/2026/03/09/ai-robots-soldiers-war/

girvo• 4 months ago

Airbus' Ghost Bat equivalent?

emregucerr• 4 months ago

Did they pick the word "uncrewed" to not use the word "unmanned"? If so, I'm not hopeful. Might be another EuroDrone disaster.

xp84• 4 months ago

Even the absence of a person could potentially become offended, I suppose.

booleandilemma• 4 months ago

Better than unpersoned I guess?

hnipps• 4 months ago

MARS also contains an AI-supported software brain called MindShare which not only replaces the missing pilot, but is also capable of coordinating entire mission groups by being distributed across many manned and uncrewed platforms.

So this is Skynet v0.1?

rlarah• 4 months ago

Let's see how this turns out. The hyped Anduril "cheap" anti-drone tech didn't work in Ukraine and evidently does not work in the Middle East.

I have more trust in Airbus than the PayPal mafia though.

bpodgursky• 4 months ago

Whether or not Anduril's cheap solution delivered, cheap anti-drone tech does work in Ukraine, interceptor drones are quite effective against Shahed-style drones.

jnaina• 4 months ago

"uncrewed combat aircraft"? it is basically an autonomous drone that is trained to act like a wingman. Just a natural evolution of where military drones are heading.

ipeev• 4 months ago

I misread “uncrewed” as “unscrewed” and for a moment this became a much stranger, better aerospace story. Not autonomous aircraft, but aircraft apparently liberated from screws. A future of pilotless aircraft is plausible enough; a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder.

Gravityloss• 4 months ago

Not as weird as one might think, fasteners produce local loads and require holes, so designing without them would be much better. It has been a goal for decades but progress is slow! Maybe uncrewed vehicles can be iterated on more rapidly.

alephnerd2• 4 months ago

a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder

This is actually an important part of what makes a stealth airframe "stealthy", along with other stuff.

dotancohen• 4 months ago

Much of the aircraft is rivets, not screws.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/6312/why-are-ai...

"Airplanes are riveted, not screwed because they are the product of engineers, not lawyers."

flowerthoughts• 4 months ago

Wouldn't uncrewed aircraft, and (hypersonic) missiles merge technologies and become the same at some point? Why are we engineering the two separately? Are missiles by definition exploding themselves rather than releasing payloads?

(I'm pretty sure Musk could make them reusable. /s)

axus• 4 months ago

As a software engineer who thinks that qualifies me to answer other engineering questions, I think it's too hard to mount payloads external to missiles, but normal for aircraft.

anshumankmr• 4 months ago

Top Gun Maverick was kinda right.

jonplackett• 4 months ago

Does this just continue the ‘western way’ of spending a crap load of money on each military item, instead of getting good at making A LOT of something really cheaply?

Ukraine and Iran are both showing it quickly becomes a war of attrition and fancy weapons get very expensive very fast, or run out very fast.

MrBuddyCasino• 4 months ago

Sure seems so. They should just clone the latest Russian improved Geran and call it a day, but oc they won’t.

tim3332• 4 months ago

The thing in the article, a modified Vlakyrie is very different to a Geran suicide drone. It's more an uncrewed mini F-35 https://www.twz.com/air/xq-58-valkyrie-heading-to-european-m...

tonfa• 4 months ago

instead of getting good at making A LOT of something really cheaply?

also you'd want to maximize dual usage (civil/military) of components so that your production capacity can be easily switched back and forth more on demand.

(Otherwise you just end up a stockpile of obsolete drones/weapons)

bgnn• 4 months ago

Instead of this we have anti dual-use policies, especially in semiconductor. Any chip a fab produces need hefty paper work to prove it cannot be used for military. This is due to the military-industrial complex lobby. They don't want cheap competition.

GuestFAUniverse• 4 months ago

It's just a project to extract the maximum amount from the "Sondervermögen", while the conservatives are still having a say.

Doesn't make sense. Esp. since the "Bundeswehr" already lacks personal and the resistance against conscription is huge.

Delaying things has become a typical German thing. They always "check" what to do, debate endlessly without results. (Like with their cartel office: no other European country has seen gasoline prices rise as fast and they're still "checking" if there's an illegal cartel agreement -- and their only solution is to lower taxes on gas, which already didn't work back when Russia attacked the Ukraine) They are still able to improve during disasters, like when they raised the LPG terminals within two years. They have to have their -- as they phrase it -- "Arsch auf Grundeis" (ass on ground ice) first, before anything is moving forward.

It's a crude mixture of conservatism, corruption/euphemism: "lobbying", laziness and old fashioned know-it alls blocking real, obvious innovation.

ivan_gammel• 4 months ago

No it does not. Drone warfare is a hot topic in Europe, there’s a lot going on right now.

https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/aerospace-news/2025/ger...

Also, Helsing is apparently a decacorn now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsing_(company)

icegreentea26• 4 months ago

I agree that European militaries need to be able to generate a lot of mass.

But we would be remiss to pick up on some threads from both Ukraine and Iran.

In Ukraine, the VKS is still able to generate substantial damage (both in tactical support of ground forces, as well as part of the civilian bombing campaign) with glide bombs (carrying 500kg+ class bombs, launched by tactical jets from over Russian controlled airspace).

These tactics are effective, and are able to do things that Shaheds aren't quite capable of doing - for example ensuring destruction of certain targets with a single hit. I imagine Ukraine would love to be able to be able to take glide bombs off the table, but it can't.

It can't because it lacks the air force to conduct an offensive counter-air campaign, and it lacks the long range strike capability to permanently disable relevant airfields, or destroy enough airframes on the ground.

European militaries would like to be able to avoid this situation, and therefore certain relatively exquisite capabilities are needed.

In Iran, while Iran has demonstrated its ability to severely tax the much more exquisite forces of the US+Israel and the Gulf States, the reality is that they have NOT been able to meaningfully degrade the US or Israel's ability to bomb Iranian ground targets at will.

European militaries would also like to be able to prevent the VKS from just... bombing central to eastern Europe at will.

European war aims - which would be to able to defeat Russian forces so soundly and quickly that Russia will forever be deterred, requires exquisite capabilities, that are able to strike the Russian war machine from the front line, all the way back several hundred kilometers in high precision, and high density (in time and in weight of payload), in a way that can actually cause collapse (when combined with ground counter attacks). It cannot rely on a Ukrainian style war or Ukrainian style tactics purely because... well, Russia is infact actually fighting that war right now, and hasn't given up yet.

A Europe that has to fight at all, is a Europe that has already lost. A Europe that has to fight for more than a few weeks or months, is a Europe that has deeply lost.

dmix4• 4 months ago

Using a beaten down Russia in the current year is probably a bad way to plan for your future military. It should be considered against a real target like China where all of those fancy jets won't get close to China proper (w/ long range AA missiles and SAMs) so everything will be at standoff range including SEAD campaigns. Which is where mass drones and cheap cruise missiles/decoys will be much more effective.

Using high end jets as delivery platforms for high end missiles is not scalable in a conflict anymore. Likewise most estimates say even the US will run out of Tomahawks within the first 1-2 months of a conflict with China. They are gambling those missiles open up a big enough window to do anything else while their own Navy is under siege in the process.

tim3332• 4 months ago

The Ukrainians are still getting a lot of use out of F16s and the US from their aircraft carriers. These things are not fully redundant yet.

CrzyLngPwd• 4 months ago

JSR_FDED2• 4 months ago

Ukraine and Iran are showing us that scrappy low-cost and improvised drones are the future. The asymmetry with slow procurement, long-term and very expensive delivery is so stark that I feel Europe (Ukraine excluded) and the US have no good answer here.

simonh• 4 months ago

Cheap systems are certainly a game changer, but I don't think they completely deprecate high performance, high end systems like this. Cheap drones by definition lack powerful long range sensor suites and associated power systems, because such a package would mean they'd no longer be cheap. They have limited range, are slower, and are less able to react dynamically to a changing combat situation.

I can see a system like this acting as the sensor and control node for a flight of cheaper drones. We've had cruise missiles for many decades now, and they're drastically more capable than cheap drones, but they didn't deprecate manned fighters. Something like this might.

radialstub• 4 months ago

These small proxy wars are irrelevant. Scrappy drones are only used because that is all these small countries can produce. For superpowers, the goal isn't to stockpile mediocre equipment; it is to develop intellectual capabilities. During wartime, manufacturing can then be rapidly ramped up. You cannot invent and develop advanced tech overnight, but you can rapidly scale production.

Also fighter jets are capable of doing so much more than fpv drones, its actually funny that people think drones are the future.

JSR_FDED2• 4 months ago

I’m not saying scrappy drones are the key to victory in all circumstances.

But look at Iran - their air defenses and navy are destroyed. Yet they can inflict massive damage on their neighbors with drones within 10 minutes flight distance, making them hard to stop.

By doing so they’re keeping the price of oil high and are able to put economic pressure on the US completely disproportionate to their military capabilities.

So even though drones are not the full solution, without an answer to them you can’t win either.

danmaz74• 4 months ago

Except, they're not. And by the way, they are two completely different conflicts.

With Ukraine, if Russia had been able to establish total air dominance early on, they wouldn't have been stopped in their tracks the way they were. The fact that they weren't able to do that has nothing to do with cheap drones, which became a decisive factor only much later.

In Iran, US and Israel were able to establish total air dominance, but they didn't have any plan to follow on with boots on the ground, which is still necessary to actually defeat an enemy. And most successful hits so far were achieved through ballistic missiles, not cheap drones.

metalman• 4 months ago

by "combat aircraft" they of course mean weapons platforms suitable for "pasivising" brown skinned agricultural communities and pastoralists, who are beligerantly living on top of extractable resources.

stotemoat• 4 months ago

Very very evil,if we remove the human cost of war our politicians will have no qualms about going to war. Ah well it's just another day in techno hell.

Airbus is preparing two uncrewed combat aircraft

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