France’s defence procurement agency, the DGA, is looking for a company to mass-produce SMOKERS, a 5-metre explosive drone boat its own engineers designed. The tender was published on 29 October.
The notice describes the SMOKERS V1 as weighing 500 kg, with satellite and radio links and an infrared camera. It can travel more than 50 nautical miles at up to 40 knots. The DGA expects about 10 boats a year in peacetime, and capacity for 50 a year if the geopolitical situation calls for it.
The winner works from the DGA’s own design file. It adjusts the design, writes the build documentation, sets up a production line and builds the boats. The notice gives no contract value or length.
Designed inside the agency
DGA engineers took SMOKERS from concept to sea trials in six months, Naval News reported on 26 October. The agency’s naval centre in Toulon built the first prototype, its electronics and software. Its hydrodynamics centre designed and made the V1 hull.
The hull is resin and fibreglass, driven by ordinary outboard motors. The DGA is aiming for a unit cost of a few tens of thousands of euros, Naval News reported. That is the price of a family car, for a boat built to hit a warship.
French Navy crews ran three of the boats from the destroyer Chevalier Paul, the amphibious ship Tonnerre and a supply ship during the WildFire counter-drone exercise. The trials let the DGA “begin discussions regarding its industrialization,” it told Naval News.
Open to leisure boatyards
Because the DGA owns the design, it can hand it to any yard. It told Naval News the boat suits “the myriad of small shipyards” on the French coast, including those that build leisure boats.
FlightBrief analysis: the DGA is buying production, not a design. Owning the drawings would let it add a second yard if it ever needs 50 boats a year.
Companies have until noon, Paris time, on 4 December to apply for the first stage of the negotiated procedure.
