In 1989, Belgium disbanded the squadron that had guarded its skies with Nike-Hercules missiles. On Monday 9 November 2026, 37 years later, it took two big steps to rebuild ground-based air defence within a single morning. Rheinmetall announced a contract for 20 Skyranger 30 air defence systems, and at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels, Defence Minister Theo Francken brought a Cold War air defence squadron back to life.

The new guns are meant for one threat above all others: drones. Rheinmetall says the systems will sit on hooklift platforms and protect Belgian territory and critical infrastructure from fixed positions, as the short-range layer of a national air defence network Belgium calls Blue Dome.

Twenty Skyrangers for Blue Dome

According to Rheinmetall’s press release of 9 November, the package covers the 20 systems plus their logistics support and is worth a sum “in the mid three-digit million-euro range”. Deliveries are scheduled to begin at the end of 2028. The company says less than 18 months passed between the first talks in June 2025 and the signed contract, and that the programme was run in close consultation with the Netherlands, Belgium’s partner on air defence.

The Skyranger 30 is an unmanned turret built around a 30 mm Oerlikon KCE revolver cannon, with its own search radar and optical tracker on board. Rheinmetall designed it to engage helicopters, small drones, loitering munitions and cruise missiles. Most buyers so far mount it on armoured vehicles such as the Boxer. Belgium has chosen a static version on a hooklift platform instead, because its job is guarding fixed sites rather than following troops in the field.

The turrets will plug into the command-and-control architecture of Blue Dome. In Belgian reporting carried by the Belga news agency, the layered shield combines ten NASAMS missile systems, the 20 Skyranger guns, 14 radars and 54 command vehicles. Francken said the NASAMS missiles can intercept targets up to 50 kilometres away, while the Skyrangers form the short-range layer aimed above all at drones.

The 51st Squadron returns

The second announcement reached back into the Cold War. The 51st Squadron, created in 1959, operated Nike-Hercules surface-to-air missiles and helped guard NATO airspace against the Soviet Union. It was disbanded in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Francken’s telling, the rest of Belgium’s surface-to-air capability disappeared in the years that followed.

On 9 November the unit was reformed and given its old mission back: responsibility for Belgium’s air defence. Writing on X, Francken said the Air Force was making history that day. According to Belga and the Anadolu news agency, the squadron will be based at Beauvechain Air Base for now and move to Ursel in East Flanders by 2032 at the latest.

Francken also explained why it matters now. As reported by Anadolu, he pointed out that wars are increasingly fought with drones and that Belgium hosts a long list of strategic targets, from NATO and the EU institutions to Euroclear, Swift and the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge. Defence expects the first NASAMS systems at the end of 2027, and a later phase is meant to add protection against ballistic missiles.

A gun answer to a cheap threat

Belgium has been here before. Rheinmetall points out that one of its predecessor companies, together with Krauss-Maffei, supplied Gepard anti-aircraft tanks to the Belgian armed forces exactly 50 years ago. Belgium withdrew its Gepards around 2006, and since then it has relied largely on its fighter jets and its allies for protection from the air.

Rheinmetall’s own presentation of the Skyranger 30, the 30 mm turret Belgium is buying for static drone defence.

The war in Ukraine changed the arithmetic. Cheap one-way attack drones arrive in numbers that make firing expensive missiles at each one unaffordable, and fighters cannot loiter over every port and power station. A radar-guided cannon firing programmable ammunition offers a far lower cost per engagement, which is why Germany, the Netherlands and others have turned back to gun-based air defence. It is the same problem we explored in How Does a Counter-Drone System Work?

For the Belgian Air Force, the result is a new kind of mission alongside its F-16s and incoming F-35s. The Nike-Hercules sites are long gone. From 2028, a revived squadron with a 1959 lineage will be guarding Belgian skies against threats its founders never imagined.

Sources: Rheinmetall press release (9 November 2026), Belga via DHnet, Anadolu Agency via TRT Haber, aeroTELEGRAPH, Janes, Militär Aktuell, Wikipedia (Skyranger 30; Flakpanzer Gepard)