Terma acquires OSL: strengthening Europe’s counter-drone defences

The rapid proliferation of small unmanned aircraft has turned airspace security and critical-infrastructure protection into a structural challenge for European states, airports and utilities. Over the past decade, counter-UAS solutions have often evolved in silos: legacy defence primes providing radars and command-and-control for armed forces on unclassified networks, and smaller, more agile civil-sector integrators building bespoke systems for airports or national-infrastructure sites. The emerging “EU drone initiative” and national programmes on critical-infrastructure resilience point in the opposite direction: integrated, layered architectures that can deal with everything from nuisance hobby drones to state-sponsored probing of air defences. In this context, the decision of a traditional defence player to acquire a full-stack civil counter-drone specialist is more than a marginal industrial move; it is a signal that the European C-UAS market is entering a phase of consolidation and cross-domain integration.