The Ministry of Defence has awarded £3.16 million to three companies to develop low-cost interceptors designed to shoot down drones, making the UK the first of five European partner nations to place contracts under a joint programme to strengthen air defence, the department has announced.
The contracts, awarded to Frankenberg Technologies, Greenjets and Cambridge Aerospace, will see the three firms develop and trial their designs for what are known as low-cost air defence effectors, weapons intended to provide a more affordable way of countering drones as adversaries field cheap, mass-produced systems in numbers that can overwhelm traditional air defences, which are more expensive and slower to produce. According to the department, Russia launched the equivalent of more than 200 drones per day into Ukraine in March 2026, and the work will support jobs at small and medium-sized businesses in Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Bristol and Stevenage, with each company holding a UK presence and committed to building manufacturing capability in the country.
The programme, called Low-Cost Air Defence Effectors, is being delivered by the National Armaments Director Group as part of a wider European effort known as Low-Cost Effectors and Autonomous Platforms, or LEAP, which brings together the UK, Poland, France, Italy and Germany to develop affordable effectors and autonomous systems.
Each nation is running its own national competition, to be followed by a multilateral phase, with the next stage focused on identifying solutions that can be produced in large numbers across the five partners, demanding the manufacturing capacity and reliable supply chains to deliver at scale. All three winners are SMEs, with Cambridge Aerospace only recently identified to the Ministry of Defence, which the department said demonstrates the value of widening access to new market entrants.
National Armaments Director Rupert Pearce said: “With the award of these contracts, Commercial X and the LCADE programme are demonstrating the powerful, low-cost capabilities we can deliver when we open up Defence and collaborate with some of the UK’s most agile, innovative companies. Through the LEAP programme, we are joining forces across borders to rapidly procure new systems, supporting both the UK and our allies against the growing mass drone threat.”
Greenjets’ chief executive said: “We are extremely proud to have been awarded this contract under LCADE and to be demonstrating the role innovative British businesses can play in rapidly strengthening national defence capabilities. We look forward to working with the MoD and our partners as we move into demonstration trials later this year.”
The contracts were placed by Commercial X, the NAD Group team tasked with accelerating procurement and lowering barriers to entry for smaller companies, which has previously put suppliers rapidly on contract for the government’s hypersonic and directed energy weapons programmes and recently signed contracts worth up to £4 million with 13 companies identified as future British unicorns.
The award gives early substance to the low-cost interceptor commitments running through the Defence Investment Plan, which puts more than £750 million into short-range counter-drone protection and rebalances munitions spending towards weapons that can be produced quickly and at scale, and it lands in the same fortnight as NATO’s Drone Edge initiative, under which allies committed over 40 billion dollars to counter-drone capabilities over five years.
The cost-per-interception problem the programme addresses was put starkly to the Defence Committee this week by Strategic Defence Review author General Sir Richard Barrons, who told MPs that technological change through directed energy and cheaper interceptors is driving down the cost per kill, but that the capacity to intercept, rather than merely detect, remains the layer of UK air defence with the furthest to go.
