Changes from plenary report to adopted text

102. Calls on the EDA to assess vendors on their operational impact and cost-efficiency in completing mission objectives rather than focusing solely on unit price;

103. Encourages the Member States to permit conditional fielding of and experimentation with systems not yet fully certified for urgent operational use with real-time evaluation in controlled environments;

104. Encourages the EDIP and other financial instruments to prioritise the financing of regional drone manufacturing hubs with shared infrastructure and regulatory fast-tracking, particularly among front line states;

Regional Manufacturing Hubs

C-UAS and regional manufacturing hubs

105. Calls on the Member States to urgently accelerate the expansion of European drone and anti-drone development and production capacities, including through the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) instrument;

106. Calls on the Commission to propose an EU drones package focusing on drone and anti-drone systems and auxiliary capabilities, which should contain a strategy for using existing instruments to stimulate research and development and the localisation of critical supply chains and a regulation on the use of drones in civilian and military contexts that is fit for the present threat scenario; calls for increased investments focusing on the integration of next-generation digital technologies into drone and anti-drone defence systems to enhance their resilience, scalability and efficiency;

107. Calls for the establishment of national hubs for drone testing, certification and interoperability across the EU;

108. Emphasises that such hubs would facilitate the testing and certification of UAV and C-UAS systems in line with EU and NATO standards;

109. Emphasises the need for drone and C-UAS testing, production and training, with the aim of strengthening the external borders and deterring hybrid aggression;

110. Stresses that regional drone manufacturing hubs should be co-located with dual-use logistics nodes connected to the TEN-T, enabling seamless movement of military and civil drone assets, spare parts and operators across borders in an integrated manner across the EU and in line with any future ‘drone wall’ concept;

111. Supports the creation of maintenance centres co-located with NATO facilities with appropriate technical equipment to enable rapid servicing of C-UAS assets;

Qualified manufacturers, fair competition and regional ecosystems

112. Emphasises that the European drone market should develop under the principles of fair competition, innovation, and open access for qualified manufacturers; notes that stability of demand and clear long-term perspectives are essential for the sustainability of European drone producers;

113. Highlights the importance of scaling up local industrial capacity to ensure competitiveness, resilience and the long-term viability of the European unmanned systems sectors;

114. Stresses that the benefits of drone-related innovation and manufacturing should be geographically balanced;

115. Calls for the creation of innovation corridors and testing sites across all regions of the Union, to ensure access to funding and to stimulate local ecosystems of start-ups, SMEs and research institutes contributing to Europe’s technological sovereignty;

116. Notes that actions related to drone and anti-drone capabilities lack long-standing pre-established practices and thus urges the Union and its Member States to take advantage of the fact by ensuring from the outset that planning, research, development, procurement and management of such capabilities are increasingly done through a European lens and that there is access to critical sovereign technologies related to drone- and anti-drone warfare in the Union;

117. Calls for ensuring that EDF eligibility criteria are adjusted to ensure higher scoring for joint procurements with more equitable geographical representation of Member States, ensuring that consortia being built are in a position to ramp up their defence industrial production;

Innovation, R&D clusters and critical component manufacturing

118. Calls on the Commission to adapt its defence and defence industrial policy instruments to ensure that they are fit for purpose to support the development of drone and anti-drone capabilities;

119. Calls for EU funding to support the creation of an advanced drone component manufacturing hub, particularly in regions with strong engineering and IT sectors by contributing to both regional development and the Union’s strategic autonomy;

120. Calls on the EDF to finance multi-national R&D clusters focused on drone propulsion, AI autonomy and hardened C2 links;

121. Stresses the importance of directing strategic investments to relevant industrial and technological hubs across the EU and supporting raw material processing, semiconductor production, battery manufacturing, drone assembly and C2 integration, while ensuring that such investments also strengthen the broader European defence industrial base;

Fast-track fielding

Drone innovation accelerator and experimentation

122. Welcomes the first European Defence Innovation Operational Experimentation (OPEX) campaign launched by the EDA and invites the EDA to transform it into a standing drone and C-UAS innovation accelerator for fast-track fielding and to validate front line feedback, accelerate prototyping, and fast-track fielding through short competitive calls in order to enable progress and innovation;

Procurement flexibility and accelerated acquisition

123. Calls on the EDA to permit Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contracts to ensure that a baseline supply is met;

124. Calls on the EDA and other tendering agencies to establish a dedicated acquisition track for UAS for off-the-shelf procurement of advanced UAS to bypass conventional multiyear acquisition processes and service contracts;

125. Calls for ensuring that EDF projects and other EU joint procurement initiatives in defence have priority rating orders that aid speedy acquisition processes and reduce complications in procurements;

Inclusion of SMEs and non-traditional vendors

126. Encourages developing national defence industries and supporting local public-private partnerships without prejudice to the quality, safety and security requirements applicable to the technology;

127. Encourages the removal of lower entry barriers for non-traditional vendors by removing non-critical security requirements in early testing and fielding to enable SMEs and non-traditional vendors to participate in defence innovation;

Critical drone component manufacturing action plan

128. Calls on the Commission in conjunction with NATO to draft a critical drone component manufacturing action plan that provides targeted subsidies for critical components, especially for brushless direct current motor, lithium battery, sensor and additive manufacturing in the EU; calls for the development and production of essential and emerging technologies and materials within the EU, including optics, communication modules and additive manufacturing; underlines the need to ensure the EU’s resilience and self-sufficiency in drone production, with strict eligibility criteria to ensure the resilience of the supply chain, and to bear in mind the longer-term goal of achieving strategic autonomy by developing indigenous European drone technologies based on EU-essential components, supported by resilient supply chains;

129. Highlights that such an action plan must ensure cooperation with European SMEs;

130. Underlines the need to include microchips, advanced software and cyber-resilience;

Regulatory environment/ESG

Regulatory simplification and harmonisation

131. Stresses the need to remove unnecessary regulatory and administrative burdens, particularly for SMEs, for the drone industry and its suppliers and to establish a European Drone Sovereignty Index to serve as an EU-wide audit tool to assess each platform’s percentage of non-EU dependencies, which can be used to prioritise funding in favour of platforms and programmes with the highest percentage of Member State-based components;

132. Calls for fast-track intra-EU licence derogations to ease internal trade while reinforcing external export controls;

133. Calls for strengthening regulatory and export control harmonisation by:

a. developing pan-EU export licensing and Regulation (EU) 2021/821-compliant component pathways to make European drones more competitive abroad while respecting EU and national export rules to make European drones more competitive abroad;

b. aligning civilian drone regulations (e.g. EASA standards) with military procurement needs to accelerate dual-use innovation;

Industrial autonomy, ESG conditionality and operational efficiency

134. Stresses that the allocation of funds for the development and production of drones and C-UAS should be based exclusively on criteria of efficiency, security, resilience and operational performance;

135. Calls for the prioritisation of spare parts, modular reparability, and rapid engine replacement capabilities in order to ensure that units remain operational under combat conditions; stresses the need for a coherent industrial and supply chain policy that provides European industry with incentives to produce scalable and easily repairable systems, while maintaining adequate stockpiles of critical components; urges the Commission and the Member States to remove procurement bottlenecks that hinder timely production and the fielding of essential defence equipment;

Security of production and overarching EU drone regulation

136. Urges the Commission and the Member States to prioritise the reinforcement and protection of EU weapons firms and European defence industry facilities, in order to mitigate potential hybrid or direct drone threats to their production lines;

137. Calls on the Commission to propose an EU Drones Package, focusing on drone and anti-drone systems and auxiliary capabilities, containing a strategy for using existing instruments to stimulate R&D and localisation of critical supply chains and a regulation on the use of drones in civilian and military contexts that is fit for the present threat scenario;

138. Calls for increased investments focusing on the integration of next-generation digital technologies into drone and anti-drone defence systems to enhance their resilience, scalability and efficiency;

139. Calls for the harmonisation of rules of engagement for offensive UAS employment across the Member States, including export controls and legal frameworks, ensuring full compliance with international humanitarian law;

Working plan for key materials

140. Calls on the Commission to draft a working plan to develop strategic reserves and stockpiles of critical components, including explosives, propellants, primers, carbon frames, electronics, motors, microchips and other key materials for UAS, USV and UUV development, reducing dependencies on third countries and increasing the resilience of the EDTIB;

141. Emphasises that these reserves should be managed with NATO coordination to ensure interoperability and avoid duplication of stockpiles;