France Speeds Hornet Air Guard Counter-Drone Kits as Threats Grow Over NATO Lines.

France’s DGA and Arquus are fast-tracking a Hornet Air Guard upgrade that gives Griffon and Serval armored vehicles an organic counter-drone layer. The move reflects growing concern inside NATO about cheap FPV drones and the need for mobile units to protect themselves without waiting for heavier air defense assets.

Arquus announced on October 9, 2025, that the company was partnering with France’s DGA procurement agency and the French Army to develop a new national self-defense capability against drones based on the Hornet Air Guard remote weapon station. The objective is clear: rapidly give Griffon and Serval armored vehicles an organic counter-UAS bubble so that every SCORPION combat unit can protect itself in a drone-saturated battlespace, without waiting for heavy ground-based air defense assets to arrive. On November 25, 2025, Arquus confirms that the development of the anti-drone solution is ongoing, with the support of DGA and the French Army. This speed-up in the development intervenes in a time when traditional armies will have to face growing aerial threats on the battlefield, as the war in Ukraine demonstrates.
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The Hornet Air Guard turret integrates a 40 mm airburst grenade launcher, a rotating radar and RF detector, and advanced day-night optronics, giving Griffon and Serval vehicles a fully networked short-range hard kill counter drone capability against small UAVs and FPV threats while maintaining standard direct fire support roles (Picture source: Arquus).

Behind this announcement sits a double urgency. First, the French Army has invested heavily in the SCORPION family of vehicles, whose survivability is now directly challenged by cheap FPV and quadcopter drones, as shown daily in Ukraine. Second, French parliamentary and expert reporting has repeatedly underlined that national counter-drone capabilities remain limited in number, overly centralized, and not optimized for mobile ground units, particularly at the battalion and company level.

The Hornet Air Guard builds on the standard Hornet T1 remote weapon station already fielded on Griffon and Serval. The baseline T1 is a gyrostabilized, 2+2 axis RCWS qualified for 7.62 mm MAG 58, 12.7 mm M2HB, and 40 mm automatic grenade launchers, with ammunition loads of up to 300 rounds of 12.7 mm or 64 rounds of 40 mm. It couples Safran optronics, a laser rangefinder, and a full-digital video chain with the SCORPION SICS battle management system, so that each turret contributes sensor data and targeting information to the combined arms group.

The Air Guard configuration adds a dedicated anti-drone layer to that existing firepower. Arquus and its Hornet business unit have reworked the independent Galix smoke-launcher ring into a rotating pan platform that can carry a compact surveillance radar, an RF direction finder, and, in French service, an airburst-capable 40 mm automatic grenade launcher. This concept was first demonstrated on AM General’s Humvee Saber Blade Edition and then refined in Europe, where the radar or jammer can scan 360 degrees independently of the weapon axis, maintaining continuous track on a drone even while the gun engages another threat.

The choice of a 40 mm airburst system is central to the concept. By using programmable grenades similar to those already validated on the VAB ARLAD anti-drone vehicle, the Hornet LAD creates a controlled fragmentation cloud around the flight path of small drones rather than relying on a direct hit. On ARLAD, French sources describe an engagement envelope of roughly 2.5 km detection and a lethal radius of about 10 meters for airburst grenades, a profile well suited to Class 1 UAVs and FPV drones. The Hornet architecture transfers that logic from a few specialized vehicles to the much larger SCORPION fleet, giving each section a short-range, low-collateral hard-kill option that outperforms 12.7 mm machine guns against tiny and highly agile targets.

On the sensor side, the Air Guard ring typically combines a lightweight X-band radar for target detection and tracking, an RF goniometer for passive detection of control links, and the Hornet’s own thermal and day cameras for final identification and fire control. These feeds are fused on the gunner’s console, where a new alert interface allows automatic slew-to-cue of the turret in a few hundred milliseconds from a radar plot, as already trialed by Arquus at the Drones Hub in Brétigny. Because Hornet turrets are fully integrated into the vehicle’s vetronics and SICS network, drone tracks can in principle be shared across a platoon, allowing one vehicle to engage a target detected by another and paving the way for collaborative C-UAS tactics.

The development path illustrates how quickly this concept has matured. Arquus initially financed an Air Guard demonstrator on its own funds, achieving automatic rappelling of the turret onto radar tracks and live-fire trials with 7.62 mm machine guns at ranges of several hundred meters. These results convinced the French Army and DGA Techniques Terrestres to open a structured development line that now targets a prototype phase within roughly a year, based on retrofit kits for existing Hornet T1s already delivered on Griffon and Serval. The aim is not to create a new niche vehicle but to scale a kit solution across the fleet so that every combat company can field a mix of standard and LAD-equipped turrets.

France already has counter-drone tools, but they are either too few or ill-suited to close maneuver. MILAD and the BASSALT architecture were designed primarily to protect fixed bases and major events, and suffer from limited mobility. PARADE, which secured the Paris 2024 Olympics, is a high-end, centralized solution rather than an organic battlegroup asset. VAB ARLAD, with its radar and 40 mm airburst launcher, has proven effective but will only field around a dozen vehicles and sits within artillery regiments, not directly inside infantry and cavalry units. At the level of the section and platoon, units are still relying on a patchwork of handheld jammers, shotguns, and improvised machine-gun fire against FPV drones, which is seldom enough against coordinated attacks.

In that context, the Hornet Air Guard gives France something qualitatively different: a distributed, vehicle-borne C-UAS layer embedded in the same turrets that already provide day-night observation and direct fire support. For domestic missions and overseas deployments, Griffon and Serval fitted with Air Guard can escort logistics convoys, protect command posts, or screen high-value assets while retaining their primary role as troop carriers. The system also dovetails with other French experiments, such as the HELMA-LP laser integrated on a T1 Hornet turret, suggesting a future where kinetic airburst, jamming, and laser neutralization could coexist on the same family of stations according to mission needs and rules of engagement.

Internationally, Arquus and its Hornet subsidiary are already turning this French requirement into an export lever. The integration of Hornet Air Guard on AM General’s Humvee Saber Blade Edition for major defense shows, combined with demonstrations on other 4x4 platforms, shows that the concept scales well beyond SCORPION and has caught the attention of armies seeking a compact C-UAS layer for light tactical vehicles. Market studies and recent joint events with John Cockerill suggest particular interest in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where customers are looking for plug-and-play RCWS packages rather than bespoke anti-drone vehicles.

For the French Army, however, the strategic shift is internal. By turning every Griffon or Serval fitted with a Hornet T1 into a potential counter-drone node, the Hornet Air Guard program accelerates the move toward a layered, massed, and networked ground-based air defense architecture. In a battlespace where drones compress decision times and punish any static posture, putting C-UAS tools into the hands of non-specialist crews at the company level may prove as decisive for survivability as armor or electronic warfare suites. How fast France can move from prototypes to serial kits will now be watched closely, not only in Paris but across NATO land forces that are wrestling with the same problem.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.