BAAINBw Signs a Seven-Year Net-Interceptor Drone Framework With ARGUS Interception — EUR 1.1 Billion, 450 Systems
Koblenz, 15 October 2026
Key points
- The Bundeswehr's procurement office BAAINBw signed the contract on 15 October, a day after the budget committee approved it; its release says the systems intercept intruding drones with a fired net and set them down at a designated place, for Bundeswehr sites at home and abroad, allied forces' sites in Germany and critical infrastructure, with first deliveries in 2027, and gives no value
- hartpunkt puts the framework at more than EUR 1.1 billion over seven years, with about 450 complete systems possible, and the first call-off at a mid-double-digit number of systems worth about EUR 165 million, to be delivered in 2027; the system is the A1 Falke
- The defence ministry's release: net-launcher drones are a proven measure for protecting installations and are as a rule used together with other systems such as jammers and detection radars
- ARGUS Interception, by its own account founded in 2023 by former Bundeswehr officers at Rotenburg an der Wümme, delivered its first system to the Bundeswehr in September 2025
A three-year-old company has taken the Bundeswehr's largest counter-drone contract for its own bases, a framework whose firm first tranche is about a seventh of its ceiling.
The procurement answers the kind of threat the office describes as small drones used to observe and sabotage military installations, and it answers it without shooting: a captured drone comes down where the operator chooses, which matters over barracks inside towns. BAAINBw's text makes the point itself, that debris is the cost of destroying a drone over populated ground. The approval, which Signal No. 167 carried beside the Patriot purchase in the same session, became a signature within a day. The frame is a Rahmenvertrag: the EUR 165 million is ordered, the rest of the EUR 1.1 billion is an option the ministry draws down by further call-offs over seven years. The firm's first delivery a year ago was one system; the first call-off, a mid-double-digit number, multiplies that by several dozen within fifteen months. Division of the ceiling by the stated count gives about EUR 2.4 million a complete system, a figure the sources do not state and that the per-system content, drones, nets, ground station and training, would have to carry.
The money on contract is EUR 165 million; the billion is a ceiling the ministry reaches only by calling off about 400 more systems. A framework signed the day after approval moves faster than most of the committee's business, and the test of the programme is not the first batch but the second call-off: whether it is placed before the 2027 deliveries have been fielded, A second call-off before the first batch is fielded would show the office buying on the framework's logic; a second call-off after it would show the ministry waiting to see the nets work.
Related · Budget committee, 14 October 2026
