Helsing and Eurenco Develop a Sovereign Modular Explosive Warhead for the HX-2 Strike Drone

The two companies framed the agreement as completing a European strike chain. Helsing provides the HX-2, an electrically propelled X-wing loitering munition with a stated range of up to 100 km, swarm-compatible and able to operate day and night in GNSS-denied and communications-denied environments. Eurenco brings what it describes as a complete high-performance Modular Explosive Warhead, specifically adapted to the drone mission. Eurenco is French state-owned, headquartered in Sorgues, with production at Bergerac and plants in Belgium and Sweden.

The stated rationale is supply security, not novelty. Both firms cite lead times of 12 to 24 months as now the norm for propellants and explosives, and present access to sovereign energetic materials as a strategic requirement rather than a procurement preference. Frank Dirksen, Helsing's Chief Commercial Officer, put it that armed forces cannot depend on platforms whose supply chains they do not control. The agreement is a Memorandum of Understanding — an intent to develop, not a signed production contract — and carries no disclosed value.

The proprietary read. The explosive fill is the part of a kill chain that rarely gets advertised and the hardest to source under an embargo, so closing it matters more than the press release suggests: Helsing already controls the HX-2 airframe and its Altra autonomy, and the warhead was the remaining externally sourced link. Note what this MoU is not — Germany's separate EUR 4.3 billion Helsing-and-Stark loitering-munition framework was halved to EUR 2 billion by the Bundestag in February and is unrelated to this deal. First reported in Signal No. 86.