The video is grainy, shot from a chase plane banking hard over the grey North Sea. A Belgian F-16 rolls in, and six stubby rocket pods glow briefly as a volley of precision-guided munitions streaks toward a target drone. The drone disintegrates. The Belgian Air Force just demonstrated one of NATO’s most promising answers to the drone plague — and it costs less than a family car.

On April 30, Belgium’s Air Component released footage of its F-16s firing Thales FZ275 laser-guided rockets at medium-sized target drones during trials at the Lombardsijde range on the country’s North Sea coast. The tests, conducted in partnership with Thales Belgium, the Belgian Land Component, and the Navy, validated what many defence planners have been arguing for months: that fast jets armed with cheap, precise rockets may be the most scalable counter-drone solution available to Western air forces.

A Belgian Solution to a Global Problem

The drone threat is no longer theoretical. Ukraine’s skies buzz with thousands of cheap attack drones daily. Iran deployed swarms against coalition forces. Even non-state actors now field drones capable of striking armoured vehicles and airfields. The problem is not detecting them — it is killing them affordably. A Patriot missile costs $4 million. A Stinger costs $120,000. The drones they are shooting down often cost less than $5,000.

Belgium’s approach flips the economics. The FZ275 is a 70mm (2.75-inch) semi-active laser-guided rocket originally designed for helicopter gunships. It weighs just 12.7 kilograms, has a range of 1.5 to 7 kilometres, and achieves a circular error probable of less than one metre at maximum range. Crucially, each rocket is orders of magnitude cheaper than a conventional missile — making it economically sustainable to fire dozens of them per sortie against swarms of expendable drones.

In the test configuration, Belgian F-16s carried six LAU-131A/A rocket pods — giving a single fighter a magazine of 42 guided rockets. That is 42 potential drone kills per sortie, at a cost the Belgian treasury can actually absorb.

How the FZ275 Works

The rocket’s guidance is elegantly simple. A laser designator — mounted on the launching aircraft, a wingman, a ground observer, or even a naval vessel — paints the target with a coded laser beam. The FZ275’s nose-mounted seeker locks onto the reflected energy and steers itself to impact. It can acquire the target before launch (Lock-On Before Launch) or after it is already in the air (Lock-On After Launch), giving the pilot tactical flexibility against fast-moving or pop-up targets.

Thales Belgium developed the FZ275 jointly with Forges de Zeebrugge (FZ), the Walloon company that has manufactured unguided rockets for NATO armies since the Cold War. The guided variant transforms a venerable “dumb” munition into a precision tool — and it slots into the same launchers already on NATO’s helicopters and fast jets. No airframe modification required.

Not Just Belgium’s Fight

The implications extend far beyond the North Sea. Ukraine signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Thales Belgium in November 2024 to jointly produce the FZ275 and develop a new warhead specifically optimised for counter-drone engagements. If Ukraine can manufacture these rockets domestically, it could field a mass-produced, precision counter-drone weapon at a scale that imported Western missiles cannot match.

Belgium is also testing BAE Systems’ AGR-20F FALCO — the latest evolution of the American APKWS II guided rocket — in the same C-UAS trials. The competition between the two systems is intentional: the Belgian Air Component wants to validate multiple rocket types before committing to full operational integration.

L3Harris, meanwhile, has already fired the FZ275 from its VAMPIRE ground-based launcher in Poland, demonstrating that the same rocket can defend forward operating bases without air support. The weapon is becoming platform-agnostic: helicopters, fast jets, ground vehicles, and even naval vessels can all employ it.

The Bigger Picture

Belgium’s trials are part of a quiet revolution in NATO’s thinking about air defence. For decades, Western militaries optimised for high-end threats: cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, advanced fighter aircraft. The weapons they built to counter those threats — Patriot, SAMP/T, AMRAAM — are devastatingly effective but ruinously expensive when fired at $500 drones.

The FZ275 represents a different philosophy. It does not replace Patriot or IRIS-T. It fills the gap beneath them — the space where cheap, numerous threats demand cheap, numerous responses. A Belgian F-16 armed with 42 laser-guided rockets, supported by a ground-based laser designator, can sweep a sector of sky clean of medium-sized drones faster and cheaper than any missile battery.

Whether this concept survives contact with real drone swarms — the kind Ukraine faces daily, where dozens of targets appear simultaneously — remains to be proven. But the footage from Lombardsijde is a start. And for NATO air forces watching nervously as the drone threat metastasises, Belgium’s 70mm solution may be the most practical answer yet.

Sources: The Aviationist, Belgian Defence, Thales Belgium, Army Recognition, Janes