The Cartridge Catches Up With the Drone: NSPA Surveys Industry for Counter-UAS Ammunition

The NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) has told industry it is in the market for ammunition that kills drones. On its eProcurement portal it has published Future Business Opportunity (FBO) 26LBS035, a market-research notice that puts a deceptively simple question to weapons and ammunition makers: what do you already sell, or could soon sell, that brings down a small uncrewed aircraft? The notice is issued for information only. It is not a tender, and it commits the agency to nothing. What it does is mark the next move in a procurement story that has run for two years, and it shifts the focus onto a part of the problem that money has so far skirted.

NSPA has bought counter-drone capability before. It signed the first Counter-small Uncrewed Aircraft System (C-sUAS) framework agreement in the alliance’s history and placed an early multinational small C-UAS contract with the detection and jamming specialists MyDefence and DroneShield. Those deals bought the means to find, track and disrupt a drone: radars, radio-frequency sensors, jammers. FBO 26LBS035 reaches past the sensor and the jammer to the consumable at the end of the kill chain. The cartridge. The shell. The interceptor round. This is the ammunition layer of the counter-drone fight, and it has been the quiet one.

What the notice asks for

The survey is exact about its target set. Responders are told to assume threats consistent with NATO Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) Class 1 and Class 2 categories, covering both multi-rotor and fixed-wing airframes of varying size and material. Class 1 is the small end of the scale, everything under 150 kg, and in the bands used by NATO air-power doctrine it subdivides into micro airframes below 2 kg, mini types up to roughly 20 kg, and small systems up to 150 kg. Class 2 runs from 150 to 600 kg. In plain terms, this is the world of the quadcopter, the first-person-view attack drone and the Shahed-class one-way attack munition that have defined the air picture over Ukraine and, with growing frequency, over NATO’s eastern border.

Against that target set the agency lists, on its own description as non-exhaustive, seven families of ammunition it wants to hear about. The spread is wide. It runs from small-arms rounds validated for shooting at aircraft, through shotgun loads for close-in work, up the calibre ladder through machine-gun and cannon natures, and out to grenade and mortar munitions, kinetic interceptors fired from a launcher, and non-kinetic net-capture rounds. The detail sits in the table further down. Three procedural points travel with it. Registration in NSPA’s Source File is mandatory for any firm that later wants to bid. Interested companies will be sent a Request for Information (RFI) carrying a fuller questionnaire. And the notice sits under NSPA Procurement Operating Instruction 4200-01, the agency’s market-research provision, which places it firmly upstream of any Request for Proposal (RFP) that may eventually follow.

Why a drone is an awkward thing to shoot

A small drone is a poor target for conventional ammunition for reasons that have little to do with marksmanship. It is small, so it presents a low radar cross-section and a small physical area to strike. It is slow and it jinks, so the firing solution is nothing like the one for a crewed aircraft. And it is often built of foam, plywood and plastic, the Russian Gerbera decoy being the clearest case, so a solid impact-fuzed projectile can pass straight through without functioning and without inflicting disabling damage. A bullet that hits nothing vital just makes a neat hole.

That physics is why the calibre list leans so heavily on two words that recur through it: airburst and proximity. A point-detonating round has to hit. An airburst or proximity-fuzed round does not. It is either time-set or it senses the target, then functions in the air close to the airframe and throws a pattern of fragments or sub-projectiles across its flight path. Probability of a kill stops depending on a direct strike and starts depending on getting a lethal cloud into the right cubic metre of sky. For a cheap, manoeuvring, structurally flimsy target, that is the difference between a magazine emptied in frustration and a drone knocked down. The same reasoning drives the interest in frangible and enhanced-lethality small-arms loads. A frangible round breaks up on the airframe instead of carrying its energy onward, which raises the chance of disabling damage and limits where the projectile travels if it misses. That last point matters when the drone is overhead your own troops, or a town.

Reading the calibre list

The natures NSPA lists map onto weapons already in NATO and allied service, and the choice of some of them is itself a signal. The small-arms and shotgun entries cover the close fight: 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm enhanced-lethality and frangible loads, target-practice variants for training, and the shotgun used as a literal drone gun with purpose-built shot shells.

The machine-gun block is the one an analyst lingers on. It names the NATO natures, 7.62×51 mm and the .50 Browning (12.7×99 mm), and sets them beside the Eastern ones: 7.62×54R mm, 12.7×108 mm, and the 14.5×114 mm of the Soviet-pattern KPV heavy machine gun. NSPA is not only canvassing the calibres its members fire from their own guns. It is taking in the ammunition that feeds the very large fleet of Soviet-pattern weapons in Ukrainian and eastern-flank hands. That is a procurement notice written with one eye on the war.

The cannon entries are where the named programmes live. The list spans 20×102 mm and 20×139 mm, 25×137 mm, the full 30 mm family (30×113 mm, 30×165 mm and 30×173 mm) and 35×228 mm, with airburst and proximity-fuzed families flagged “where applicable.” Each maps to real hardware, set out in the table below. Above the guns sit the grenade and mortar munitions, where 40 mm programmable airburst is the obvious fit, and then the two boundary cases the agency is careful to phrase. Missiles and loitering or kinetic interceptors qualify only “if offered as ammunition to a launcher system,” which invites laser-guided rockets and small interceptors to be treated as a consumable round rather than a system in their own right. And non-kinetic effectors qualify only if delivered as a consumable round, the net-capture projectile being the example given.

The named developments give the list its texture. The 35×228 mm entry is the calibre of Rheinmetall’s Oerlikon AHEAD (Advanced Hit Efficiency And Destruction) round, the tungsten-cloud airburst the Skyranger 35 turret fires, a system Rheinmetall is now supplying to Ukraine. The 30×113 mm entry is the calibre of the US Army’s XM1225 Aviation Proximity Explosive (APEX) round, fired from the AH-64 Apache against drones in trials reported early in 2026; the parallel XM1211 High Explosive Proximity and XM1223 Multi-Mode Proximity Airburst rounds put the same proximity fuzing into the ground 30 mm chain gun. Read together, the cannon entries are a shopping list for the airburst revolution that the drone war has forced on tube ammunition.

But doesn’t NSPA already own the catalogue?

There is a fair objection to a survey like this. NSPA is the custodian of the NATO Master Catalogue of References for Logistics (NMCRL), the only legitimate NATO codification catalogue, and it is not a modest one: roughly 35 million NATO Stock Numbers (NSNs) and around three million suppliers. If any organisation should already know what ammunition exists, it is the one that runs that catalogue. So why ask the market?

Because NMCRL records a different thing from the one the notice needs. It is a codification and logistics-identification tool. For each item it holds the NSN, the manufacturer and its NATO Commercial and Government Entity (NCAGE) code, the part number and management data. It establishes that an item exists in the supply system and who makes it. It does not establish whether a given round will defeat a Class 1 multi-rotor drone, how reliably, or at what range. The catalogue answers “what is this, and who supplies it.” The survey asks “what will bring down this target, and can I buy it now.” Those are not the same question, and 35 million stock numbers do not bridge them.

Three features of the catalogue make the gap structural. It is ordered by what an item is, sorted into supply classes, rather than by the mission it performs, so there is no counter-drone heading to search against. It is a record of what has already been codified, which usually happens only after a nation has procured an item, so the recent, commercial and near-term offerings the survey is chasing are largely absent, along with many of the Eastern-pattern natures on the list. And it says nothing about whether a maker has marketed or validated a round specifically for engaging aircraft, because that qualification status sits with the manufacturer, not in a logistics reference.

Read that way, the notice is quietly revealing. The body that keeps NATO’s catalogue is signalling, in effect, that the catalogue has fallen behind the threat. The drone war has produced a class of ammunition faster than the codification system can capture it, and the only way to see the current market is to ask it directly.

The arithmetic NSPA is trying to fix

A market survey for cannon shells reads as strategically significant because of money. Through 2025 NATO states found themselves spending air-defence missiles worth roughly a million each to bring down drones worth a thousand or two. The most pointed example came in September 2025, when more than twenty Russian drones, including cheap foam-and-plywood Gerbera types, crossed into Polish airspace and allied forces answered with fast jets and missiles. The Secretary General put the problem bluntly.

The alliance’s answer has two prongs, and FBO 26LBS035 belongs to the cheaper one. The first prong is low-cost interceptors: under the Eastern Sentry activity declared after the Polish incursion, the United States loaned Merops interceptors to Poland and Romania, each costing in the region of 14,500 US dollars, a fraction of a Shahed and far less again than a missile. The second prong is the gun. A 35 mm AHEAD round or a 30 mm proximity shell costs a small fraction of any air-defence missile, and a turret carries hundreds of them rather than a handful. Gun ammunition is the deep, affordable magazine in the counter-drone fight. What NSPA is trying to do with this survey is populate that magazine with rounds that are qualified, available and interchangeable across the alliance, so the shell rather than the interceptor becomes the default answer to a two-thousand-dollar drone.

Who answers, and the qualification burden

The firms positioned to respond are the established ammunition primes and a few specialists. Rheinmetall owns the 35 mm AHEAD line and a wide 30 mm range. Northrop Grumman is the developer behind the US Army’s 30 mm proximity natures. Nammo, BAE Systems, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, Olin Winchester and the specialty small-arms houses cover the small and medium calibres; Diehl Defence, MBDA and Raytheon sit at the interceptor end; and a niche maker such as OpenWorks Engineering covers the net-capture round. None of that is in doubt as capability. The filter is elsewhere.

The RFI questionnaire asks not only about calibre and performance but about “safety/compliance status” and “integration constraints,” and that is the wording that narrows the field. A round NSPA can buy on behalf of member states has to clear ammunition safety qualification and the quality-assurance regime that governs NATO procurement, the Allied Quality Assurance Publications (AQAPs) and the relevant Standardization Agreements (STANAGs), and it has to function reliably in the weapons that members already field. Two strands of that regime bear directly on these natures. Explosive qualification runs through STANAG 4170 and its test manual, Allied Ordnance Publication 7 (AOP-7), the route by which a fill is judged safe and suitable for service. The programmable and proximity fuzes that make airburst possible are munition-related computing systems, so they answer to STANAG 4452 and its software-safety guidance, AOP-52. Both sit with NATO’s Ammunition Safety Group (AC/326), a separate lane from the quality-assurance publications. On the wider kill chain, NATO is also standardising how sensors, command systems and effectors share one picture through SAPIENT (Sensing for Asset Protection with Integrated Electronic Networked Technology), adopted as a Standardization Recommendation (STANREC 4869); a round has to plug into that architecture as cleanly as it loads into the gun. A performance claim on a brochure is cheap. A qualified, safety-cased, interchangeable round delivered in volume is the hard part, and it is the part the survey is quietly testing for behind its open phrasing.

ISC Commentary

FBO 26LBS035 is a small document with a clear meaning. Having bought the sensors and the systems first, NATO is now industrialising the cheap end of the counter-drone fight: the ammunition. The sequence is logical. There is little point fielding radars and jammers across the eastern flank if the effector that finishes the engagement is a missile too expensive to fire twice. A qualified family of airburst and proximity rounds, common across allied guns, is what turns a demonstrated capability into a sustainable one.

Two features of the notice deserve to be read closely. The first is the deliberate inclusion of Eastern calibres alongside NATO ones, which ties the exercise directly to Ukraine and to the Soviet-pattern guns still in service on the flank; this is not a tidy NATO-standard wish list. The second is the gap between the breadth of the survey and the discipline an eventual contract will demand. The real test is not whether industry can describe a drone-killing round, because it plainly can. It is whether NSPA can convert a wide market scan into a narrow set of safety-qualified, affordable, interchangeable natures quickly enough to matter on a border where the threat is already flying.

For now, the honest caveats. The published notice carries no closing date in the copy reviewed, states no contract value, and binds the agency to nothing. The 2024 C-sUAS framework agreement is the most likely template for whatever follows, but no RFP has been issued. This is a question NATO is asking its industry, not yet an order it is placing. The value of watching it lies in what the RFI questionnaire reveals next, and in whether the agency moves from survey to solicitation on the timeline the eastern flank needs.