France Orders Twelve More SLAM-F Mine-Warfare Drones and Charters the Vessels to Carry Them

SLAM-F is the programme replacing France's crewed mine-hunters, and its architecture is a stack rather than a ship. The building block already in service, MMCM, was developed by Thales in cooperation with Britain: an unmanned surface vessel carries a remotely operated vehicle and three Exail A27 autonomous underwater vehicles, and does its own obstacle avoidance with a dedicated sonar plus a variable-depth towed array. The mine is found, classified and neutralised without a crewed hull entering the field.

The two industrial lines behind it are separate, and both are multinational. The drones come from the Franco-British programme with Thales as system authority; the vessels intended to carry them come from the Belgian-Dutch mothership line. A further DGA order, placed alongside, covers eight next-generation autonomous underwater drones from Thales and Exail — the same pairing that Thales's pending acquisition of Exail will eventually put inside one company.

The chartering is the part worth noting, and the order states it plainly. France is buying drones and renting hulls to carry them, which separates the growth of the mine-warfare force from the delivery of purpose-built motherships — the slowest and most expensive element of the programme. Großwald recorded the order in Signal No. 116. What the order does not settle is how long the arrangement is meant to last: a charter is a bridge or a decision, and the DGA has not said which. The check is whether the Belgian-Dutch motherships stay in the programme of record at the same number.