Fifty thousand drones for roughly 90 million euros, about 103 million dollars. That is the price a source familiar with the arrangement put on a reported German purchase of attack drones for Ukraine, an order that would rank among the largest of its kind in the West.
The machines are Shrike first person view drones, cheap and built to be used once. Each flies into its target and is destroyed, so armies buy them by the tens of thousands. What sets this batch apart is software: an autonomous tracking system designed to lock onto a moving target and chase it through the last seconds of flight.
Three countries, one drone
No single factory makes the Shrike. SkyFall, a Ukrainian manufacturer, builds the hardware. Auterion, an American defence technology firm, supplies the guidance software. A British company, Skycutter, has produced a variant called the Shrike 10-F.
Splitting the work this way lets output grow faster than one country could manage alone. Auterion has said it aims to deliver 100,000 drones over the year through deals with several Western governments, which makes the German order one large piece of a bigger push.
Little on the record
Few officials would talk. Lorenz Meier, Auterion’s chief executive, confirmed the details of the contract. SkyFall acknowledged that Germany was involved but said nothing more. Germany’s defence ministry pointed to operational security, and Ukraine’s defence ministry also declined to comment.
Some of the drones have reportedly been handed over already, with the remainder due during the year. The design is not new. Shrikes have been flying in Ukraine since 2023, so buyers get a model with two years of combat behind it rather than an untried prototype.
Other Western orders
Britain has committed to 150,000 drones in a package worth 752 million pounds. The Pentagon has taken delivery of 33,000 units from a 50 million dollar contract, and a larger initiative worth 1.1 billion dollars is under way to buy hundreds of thousands more. In the first round of that American competition, the Shrike 10-F finished first on the leaderboard.
The economics are blunt. A few hundred euros of parts can produce a drone able to find and hit a moving vehicle, something expensive armour has trouble stopping. By paying for 50,000, Germany is favouring numbers and smart guidance over a small stock of costly systems.
