Villepinte (France) (AFP) – Like in a Lego game, navies will be able to adapt their ships to the threats of the moment thanks to ready-to-use equipment: a turret housing different combinations of ammunition or containers with sensors and anti-drone systems.

Published on: 06/11/2026 - 22:32

At the Euronaval global defense show this week, manufacturers presented modular solutions designed to respond to lessons learned from conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, making it possible to quickly add new capabilities to ships without changing their architecture.

“We cannot afford to fire an Aster missile at all types of drones because after a while, there will be none left to shoot down a hypervelocity missile that will arrive on our boats,” explains Stephan Meunier, marketing director of Naval Group, a French group specializing in defense shipbuilding.

Sledgehammer against a fly

An imbalance that the war in the Middle East has highlighted, with Western armies having used sophisticated missiles against Iranian Shahed drones contributing to the scarcity of munitions to deal with more advanced threats.

“It’s like using a sledgehammer to crush a fly,” says Stephan Meunier.

To have a response adapted to each threat, Naval Group, a French manufacturer of submarines and frigates, developed Rampart in two years, a turret which can carry four modules of identical or different munitions, currently in the testing phase.

Rockets, short-range anti-aircraft missiles, torpedoes or grenades: the modules can accommodate weapons from different producers.

At Thales, a French high-technology and defense group, "everything we have delivered over the last 40 years can now also be supplied in the form of containerized solutions", explains Jan Dekker, responsible for the group's maritime modular capacity, to AFP.

These containers presented at Euronaval can accommodate sensors, but also missiles, cannons and equipment to jam or destroy drones.

Modular and agile

“We can equip existing ships that have been in the fleet for 10, 15, even 20 years, to which we can add a module for anti-drone combat,” emphasizes Jan Dekker.

“If you say: ‘I have a mine-fighting mission for three months, but in the following quarter I want to do maritime policing’, you can remove a container and install another,” explains the manager.

These modules can be delivered “as early as tomorrow”.

Modularity is one of the key words of this 30th edition of Euronaval, as is “hybridity” to designate these future fleets where drones and manned warships will act in concert.

“All the navies present here are asking us about hybridity, that is to say how collaborative combat is carried out between ships with crew and ships without crew,” declared Pierre Éric Pommellet, CEO of Naval Group and president of Euronaval.

Master the data

What's new is "integrating autonomous means into naval forces to make them efficient", underlines Vice-Admiral Éric Chaperon, Thales marine defense advisor.

The group unveiled at Euronaval its naval version of Hexaforce, command software designed to aggregate and analyze large quantities of military data in order to help staffs plan and conduct their operations.

“All equipment today generates a considerable mass of data. And whoever succeeds in using and mastering this data will acquire an undeniable advantage over their adversary,” explains Éric Chaperon to AFP.

Predicting the location of future data centers on board ships and providing them with sufficient energy is already a headache for manufacturers.

“We are working a lot on the future digital architecture of the aircraft carrier” France Libre, which is scheduled to enter service in 2038, even though some of the computer systems that will be on board do not yet exist or will have become “obsolete” by then, the general delegate for Armaments, Patrick Pailloux, declared to the press.

Naval Group, for its part, unveiled its “concept ship”, a prospective vision of the combat ship intended to face high-intensity conflicts while integrating more drones within hybrid fleets.

© 2026 AFP

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