Last week the Dutch armed forces were on high alert. Several drones appeared above military airfields, from Volkel to Eindhoven. Shots were fired, searches were made — but not a single drone was actually brought down. The events made one thing painfully clear: the Netherlands lacks effective means to take out small, fast drones directly. An anti-drone weapon is badly needed.
And exactly there, in the middle of all that attention, comes a remarkable revelation from an unexpected quarter. AI Armaments, a Dutch start-up that until now was mainly known at trade fairs and in small networks, is working on a completely home-grown anti-drone weapon. A development that — strikingly — has not yet appeared anywhere in the news.
A Dutch first in the anti-drone world
During a visit by De Telegraaf, founder Gerard Zondervan explains that his company is working on a weapon that is also attracting a great deal of international attention: an anti-drone grenade that explodes at short distance from the drone and thereby takes it out. Not via jamming, not via lasers, but purely through kinetic destruction — simple, robust and effective. The system consists of a 40mm launcher to fire the grenade, plus acoustic detection and a detection radar. Exactly what it will look like has not yet been made public.
Also striking: the system is being built on a VECTOR, the light combat vehicle used by Dutch commandos and (partly) by the airmobile brigade. The system has not yet been bought by the Dutch Ministry of Defence and will still have to be tested. But it possibly means that Special Forces could deploy a mobile, Dutch anti-drone shield within a not too long time. At the moment these Dutch units do not yet have such anti-drone weapons, so it would not be strange if this were announced soon. They are badly needed.
The grenade that detonates two metres from its target
The technology Zondervan developed sounds almost like something from a modern war report: a 40 mm grenade that approaches its target after firing and explodes within two metres. That is just enough to blow a drone — even a small or fast one — completely apart through the blast wave and fragmentation.
The Netherlands is not known for its own weapons production, let alone for developing new munitions or air defence equipment. That a small start-up is doing this, with Dutch designers and domestic production ambitions, is exceptional.
The start-up is still working on the grenade, the launcher and integration on the VECTOR. According to Zondervan, there have been talks and there is interest, but concrete details about a purchase by the Ministry of Defence have not yet been shared. (to be continued)
