A significant step was taken in December 2024. Here, the navy received the first production-standard USV delivered under its Système de Lutte Anti-Mines Marines du Futur (SLAM-F) maritime mine counter measures (MMCM) programme, Rear Admiral David Desfougères, the French Navy’s head of planning and programmes, told Naval News. The C-Sweep USV, developed by Thales, was handed over by international defence equipment co-operation organisation OCCAR .
The rest of the systems are scheduled for delivery in 2025, the admiral added.
Alongside the MCM-based SLAM-F USV capability, the navy is looking at developing USVs to support three other missions, Rear Adm Desfougères explained.
First, he said, “the navy will equip itself with USVs for hydro-oceanographic missions”. Here, the admiral added, it has tested Exail’s DriX H-8 USV as part of the programme to renew the navy’s hydro-oceanographic capability. France’s Naval Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service is in the process of procuring one DriX H-8 USV.
Second, the navy is conducting a study assessing the role of USVs in future amphibious operations.
Third, Rear Adm Desfougères said:
“The Marine Nationale has a clear strategy towards [development of a] naval combat drone.”
This latter development reflects wider moves by NATO navies to use USVs to add combat mass, not only in generating numbers presence for sensing but in delivering strike and other kinetic effects to support the requirement for ‘precise mass’.
Like many other NATO navies, the French Navy was present at the Portuguese Navy-hosted exercise ‘REPMUS’ (‘Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping with Maritime Unmanned Systems’), which took place off the Troia peninsula, southern Portugal in September.
For the French Navy, several key capability developments and lessons learned related to using USVs in above-water warfare, including in amphibious operations.
French naval presence at the exercise was built in particular around the Vulcain-class MCM diving tender vessel FS Acheron. The multi-purpose ship was the main platform the navy deployed to the exercise, a French Navy spokesperson told Naval News, adding that deploying USVs and uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) from Acheron was one of the key outputs of the navy’s participation in ‘REPMUS’.
Notably, the ship embarked and deployed Saab Piraya USVs, brought to the exercise by the Swedish company. The ability to deploy USVs from a platform like a diving tender can support a range of surface warfare operations, including amphibious activities. For example, the spokesperson added that uncrewed systems provided by the French Navy played a core role in conducting full bathymetric profiling of a landing corridor in order to enable an amphibious assault.
Across ‘REPMUS’, Acheron supported above-water working groups, mine warfare serials including through deploying explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) divers, and rapid environmental assessment serials, the navy spokesperson said.
Acheron also hosted some crucial testing during the exercise, including in multi-domain contexts.
For example, Thales personnel tested the company’s expeditionary portable operations centre onboard, in a serial in which uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) were given live tasking to identify a target at sea. The spokesperson identified the integration of an uncrewed systems command-and-control (C2) capability onboard Acheron as a key achievement for the navy during ‘REPMUS’.
Also onboard Acheron were personnel from Elwave, a French company that has developed the TETRAPULSE detection and imagining system, harnessing the company’s Controlled Electric Detection And Ranging (CEDAR) technology. This technology can be fitted to remotely operated uncrewed underwater vehicles (ROVs/UUVs) to make electric images of sonar contacts in detection of both magnetic and non-magnetic bottom objects. The navy spokesperson explained that such technology can be very useful for mine warfare operations, adding that ‘REPMUS’ represented the first use of CEDAR technology in mine warfare operations.
The navy used several other uncrewed systems in the exercise, including: two EXAIL Alister/A-9 UUVs, developed for mine warfare operations; ROVs such as EXAIL’s R7, Deep Trekker’s PIVOT, and the VideoRay Mission Specialist Defender; and two micro autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), the RTsys Nemosens and SEABER’s Marvel.
Other achievements and lessons the navy gleaned from the exercise were both specific and broad.
In the former instance, the navy deployed divers to conduct identification of contacts detected by light detection and ranging (LIDAR) remote sensing technology used by a Schiebel S-100 Camcopter UAV. In the latter instance, steps were taken to improve interoperability with NATO partners, for example in mine warfare operations assessing sonar data and looking at change detection in sonar surveillance, or working with allies using the NATO-developed Common Autonomy Tasking Layer (CATL) protocol, designed to enable information to be passed between specific MUS vehicles.
