Algeria is urgently seeking counter-drone systems from France and China, reports Euro.dayfr, to mitigate the threat of alleged Moroccan drone incursions but is facing significant challenges.
The army “is urgently seeking an appropriate response to counter the threat of Moroccan drones, in particular Israeli drones which have been delivered in large quantities to Morocco since 2021,” reports the news source. “Drones which have been a hit against the Polisario armed militias by neutralizing many of their equipment and several of their armed units. Faced with this growing danger from Moroccan drones, the Algerian army has accelerated its negotiations abroad to urgently acquire anti-drone detection radars. These negotiations began at the end of 2022 with mainly Chinese and French suppliers.
“During his strategic visit to Paris at the end of last January, the boss of the Military Institution in Algeria, Saïd Chengriha, insisted a lot to his French military counterparts on the need for Algeria to quickly equip itself with its radars that the French army had started experimenting recently by installing them on forward armored vehicles in order to perform shots capable of destroying drones.
“Negotiations with French partners have taken a serious “shot of firedamp” to use the terminology of French President Emmanuel Macron because of the new political and diplomatic crisis born in the aftermath of the so-called affair of Amira Bouraoui, this Franco-French opponent Algerian woman evacuated by France from Tunisian territory where she was forcibly sequestered to be extradited to Algiers.
“This stalemate has forced the Algerian military to fall back on China to try to obtain anti-drone systems. But then again, it turns out that Chinese suppliers are reluctant to sell these technologies given that China has established itself as one of the largest sellers of military drones in the world, especially in North Africa. Morocco is one of its customers as is Algeria and selling systems that exploit the deficiencies of their own drones, the Chinese do not seem to be convinced by the correctness of this approach. This places the Algerian army in a very perilous situation from a purely tactical point of view in the face of the high threat of the deployment of sophisticated military drones in the region.”
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https://euro.dayfr.com/world/29387.html
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