At a naval technology centre in Toulon this month France’s defence minister, Catherine Vautrin, watched seven prototype armed surface vessels race through demonstrations intended to accelerate the navy’s adoption of unmanned, weaponised boats. The trials were organised by the Direction générale de l'armement (DGA) after industry, the armaments authority and the general staff agreed to a compressed, competition-style evaluation rather than a traditional long-winded specification process.
Paris wants a new class of small, manoeuvrable systems to protect coasts, escort ships and deter attacks on anchorages. The programme launched jointly by the navy and the DGA in late 2025 envisages a tournament of designs this week, from which three winners will advance to a second round in early spring and one or two models could begin entering service in 2027.
The DGA and France’s defence innovation agency have explicitly changed the procurement logic: instead of precise, paper-based requirements and protracted tendering, the state will seed small amounts of money to let prototypes demonstrate performance and generate real operational data. Officials say this trial-driven method reveals cost-performance trade-offs quickly — for example whether an extra hour of endurance justifies the additional expense — and shortens the gap between battlefield need and material supply.
The move is part of a broader push to diversify investment away from only large capital ships such as submarines and carriers. The navy has already ordered more than a dozen shipborne drones — including Airbus’s VSR700 and Austria’s Schiebel Camcopter — and the DGA is rolling out new classes of expendable long-range loitering munitions and short-range targeting pods to accompany them.
Paris is buying 1,000 AI-enabled aerial drones and has greenlit a production project for low-cost long-range loitering munitions; the first batch of a European-made one-way “effector” will be delivered around mid-2027 with a range exceeding 500 kilometres and speeds above 400 km/h. The DGA also plans to field 460 short-range “Damocles” targeting pods to augment precision fires.
Vautrin framed the changes as a response to a transformation in the character of war: faster tempos, dispersed platforms and asymmetric threats mean the armed forces must experiment in the field and accept imperfect, incrementally improved capabilities rather than await theoretical perfection. She set priorities for the DGA: streamline and decentralise procurement, prune useless rules to save cost, and embed responsibility for continual adaptation in acquisition chains.
The acceleration is aimed as much at sustaining France’s defence industrial base as at military utility. Higher procurement spending in 2025 and an emphasis on exportable, cutting-edge systems are intended to keep French suppliers competitive and preserve sovereign manufacturing know-how. But the new model also raises questions about oversight, interoperability with allies, and how France will control proliferation of increasingly autonomous and lethal unmanned systems.