Two announcements on either side of Euronaval 2026 show European navies trying to answer the same question in different ways: how to put more expendable or optionally crewed combat capability on the water quickly, and how to produce it at the rate a long fight would demand.
In France, the Direction générale de l’armement (DGA) has gone out to industry to industrialize a kamikaze naval drone that its own engineers built. In Sweden, Saab has unveiled the CB90 CX, a larger version of its combat boat that can operate with a crew of up to ten or with no one aboard, and that can be fitted for surveillance, anti-ship strike or drone defense.
France: A State-Built Drone Goes to Industry
As Zone Militaire / Opex360 reported on 1 November, the DGA has issued a tender worth €36 million including VAT to industrialize SMOKERS, a teleoperated naval munition (MNTO) designed by the DGA’s own technical centres. The contract runs four years, with a possible two-year extension.
The selected company would adjust the design, produce a manufacturing file, set up the industrial production tool and then build the munitions “at a rate meeting the forces’ needs.” The tender does not state how many are to be built.
The name stands for Système Maritime Opérationnel Kamikaze Évolutif en Réalisation Souveraine. According to the tender details reported by Opex360, the drone weighs about 500 kg, is five metres long, reaches 40 knots, has a range of more than 50 nautical miles, and carries satellite communications and optronic sensors.
The program’s novelty lies less in the boat than in how it was built. Speaking in July, DGA deputy director IGA Alexandre Lahousse said he wanted the agency to return not only to “having things done” by industry, but also to buying off the shelf and to “doing” — producing solutions itself. The aim, he said, “is not to do industry’s job,” but to assemble technological building blocks and fill in “the interstitial”: “a few lines of code here, a few physical interfaces there.” He cited SMOKERS, developed in six months, and DENEB, an electronic-warfare payload developed in three, as examples that build expertise, especially among younger engineers.
Responsibility for moving from prototype to series production rests with CERDAN, the DGA’s expert centre for naval drones and autonomous systems. Its stated mission is to manage “the scaling up from state prototyping to a series deployable on French Navy ships.” Three SMOKERS prototypes were deployed in the Navy’s latest Wildfire counter-drone exercise in the Mediterranean, held from 28 September to 2 October.
The tender is an industrialization step, not a production order of a stated size. What remains to be seen is how many units the Navy wants, how fast it wants them and which company wins the work.
Sweden: A Combat Boat That Can Be Crewed or Uncrewed
Saab introduced the CB90 CX on 2 November ahead of Euronaval in Paris, as Army Recognition reported. The boat is 18 metres long, 4 metres wide and draws 1.1 metres, making it 1.4 metres longer and 0.3 metres wider than the CB90 NG. Two 1,100 hp diesels driving waterjets give it more than 40 knots fully loaded and a range of more than 300 nautical miles near that speed. It carries more than five tonnes of payload, compared with three tonnes for the NG.
The CX can carry up to ten personnel or operate without anyone aboard. Saab’s Autonomous Ocean Core provides remote control and autonomous navigation, and the Combat Core digital system ties together vessel automation, equipment monitoring, steer-by-wire controls and fire control. Army Recognition notes that weapons use remains subject to human decision.
Saab offers three configurations:
- ISR: a Sea Giraffe 1X X-band 3D AESA radar on a mast that can be raised to 11 metres, plus a stabilized Trackfire remote weapon station. This version can pass tracks to separate missile-carrying boats.
- Anti-ship: two launchers for MBDA’s Marte ER, which can hit surface targets beyond 100 km when it has external targeting data. Army Recognition stresses that this is an integration option, not a confirmed Swedish choice; Sweden’s amphibious forces are buying a different missile.
- Short-range air defense: Rheinmetall’s SeaSnake 30 turret with a KCE-30 revolver cannon firing programmable airburst rounds against drones, helicopters and loitering munitions.
Sweden is the launch customer, and its first CB90 CX was in final acceptance trials in late October; no handover date has been disclosed. In February, Sweden’s Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) ordered eight SeaSnake 30 systems for €63 million, with an option for 29 more and deliveries beginning in February 2028. That order is intended for the CB90 NG fleet, not the CX.
Why It Matters
These two programs sit at different points on the same spectrum. SMOKERS is a single-use munition built to be produced in numbers and expended. The CB90 CX is a reusable, reconfigurable combatant that can be crewed when the mission needs people aboard and uncrewed when the risk is too high. Together they show how a navy’s small-combatant layer is splitting into expendable effectors and modular carriers, both tied into a wider network of sensors and shooters.
The French case is mainly about the process. The DGA did not wait for industry to propose a product; it built one, tested it in an exercise and is now asking industry to make it producible. That reverses the usual sequence, and it makes the tender a test of whether a state-designed prototype can be turned into a manufacturing line without losing the speed that produced it. The open question is quantity: with the number of units unstated, €36 million over four to six years does not yet say how big a production line France is willing to pay for.
The Swedish case is about modularity. The ISR version, which can pass tracks to separate missile carriers, implies boats working as a distributed team rather than as standalone platforms, with sensing, strike and air defense spread across several hulls. The air-defense fit reflects the lesson running through Wildfire and through Ukraine’s Black Sea war: any small surface force now has to be able to defend itself against drones.
Both programs make the same underlying point.
In the littorals, naval power will rest increasingly on the ability to field, network and replace many smaller systems, and the industrial question of how fast they can be built matters as much as the platforms themselves.